Thursday, July 23, 2015

Hey Gov. Rauner...

...I thought everyone was leaving Illinois for Indiana?

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Kraft Heinz to Move Chicago-Area Headquarters to City Center" (all emphasis mine):

The new Kraft office will have an open layout spanning five floors. The move to downtown will “firmly establish our dynamic new culture, based on meritocracy, speed, efficiency and collaboration,” Mr. Mullen said in a statement. 

Other companies have been moving into Chicago and other urban spaces, in part to attract younger talent in touch with budding consumer trends—which is especially important for food companies like Kraft that have struggled to keep their brands relevant. 

Kraft opened a swanky new downtown office in spring 2014, hoping it would help recruit employees. At the time, executives said the satellite office would also make meetings easier and improve commuting for some of its Chicago-area staff, roughly a third of which lived in or near downtown. Mr. Mullen said that space would now be subleased.

Oh, and ConAgra is moving downtown, too: 

ConAgra Foods plans to leave Naperville and move its Chicago-area offices to a huge space in the Merchandise Mart, the latest example of a major employer shifting workers downtown from the suburbs. 

The Omaha, Neb.-based food giant is negotiating a 200,000-square-foot lease in the River North building, where it is expected to move workers from the western suburb, according to people familiar with its plans. 

Those deals are part of a larger recent trend in which many large corporations have either moved offices downtown from the suburbs or have created satellite offices there in part to help in recruiting younger employees who want to work in the city. The Mart was the recipient of the largest such move in decades, when phone maker Motorola Mobility in 2014 moved more than 2,000 workers to 604,000 square feet in the Mart from north suburban Libertyville.

No comments: