This story was originally published in Site Selection Magazine in the May 2020 edition.
Adam Bruns | Site Selection Magazine
“The 2008 financial crisis not only spawned the Great Recession, it also introduced another phrase that went from shorthand to a joke in short order: shovel-ready. In the context of the federal stimulus bill, it meant infrastructure improvement projects that were ready to be constructed, the thought being that those projects would fuel job creation and business improvement all at once.
The program didn’t roll out as smoothly as the on-ramps it was intended to build. But as some projects moved forward and some stalled, shovel-ready came to be applied in another, familiar context: the preparation and inventory of industrial sites for immediate company investment. One of the keys to any well prepared site, of course, is being near major transportation and other infrastructure that the original stimulus bill was intended to support.
Now, as businesses suffer from the COVID-19-induced shutdown, they look to a post-pandemic recovery. As the pandemic has progressed, consumers and companies alike have witnessed the primacy of logistics and e-commerce as ongoing essential business — Amazon.com alone pledged to hire 175,000 temporarily to both get the suddenly unemployed a paycheck and get the huge spike in packages to their destinations…”
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