Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
Chicago has poached numerous businesses away from their traditional homes, so I guess what goes around comes around to some extent.
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indeed.
and neither Boeing nor Caterpillar were ever truly "chicago" companies with any real history or legacy in this town. they both came to town as small little c-suite offices with the big fancy impressive "HQ" on the front door (boeing lured by tax breaks that then expired and so they skipped town, and caterpillar came ostensibly for ORD, but then decided that DFW is just as good and puts them in texas where more of their customers are), but over 95% of actual company ops remained elsewhere.
it goes back to this post by ocman:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ocman
At this point Fortune 500 city lists is now just a game of luring other cities'/states’ headquarters with cash and tax incentives. It’s not even real anymore. Companies avoiding taxes by relocating like 2% of their company. It’s paper.
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Boeing and Caterpillar having "chicago" HQ's was good PR "feather in the cap" stuff for our local civic booster orgs, but neither one ever had any serious footprint here.
the loses are more symbolic than anything, not that it doesn't mean that they don't still sting. when boeing left seattle it was seen as some huge coup, but in the end all it ever really gave chicago was the ability to say
"hey, look, we have the HQ of Boeing!!!" even though that never really meant a great deal, what with their relatively small 300-person office space downtown.
now if an company like Mcdonald's or Mondelez left chicago entirely (meaning all of it, not just a couple hundred c-suiters),
THAT would do some serious damage.