Motor car firms might have been troubled, established industries like Procter and Gamble could let people go and it long has been obvious that the TWA airlines operation in Kansas City faced a dubious future.
We've seen the venerable Montgomery Ward go broke, major department stores and various retail chains struggle and even fade. There have been all sorts of collapses and disasters in electronics, including shaky status for Kansas City's vast Sprint empire. The stock market can be capricious and brutal.
It couldn't happen the Menninger Clinic leaving Topeka. But it did. But never would the Boeing aircraft empire desert Seattle. Yet even that far-fetched happening may be coming sooner than most anyone ever dreamed.
To say the Boeing hometown area was stunned by the recent announcement that the company headquarters might wind up in Chicago, Denver or Dallas-Fort Worth is a vast understatement. How might that affect the Boeing operation in Wichita, which employs more than 17,000? There has been ongoing evidence that all was not as ideal as officials and stockholders of Boeing would prefer.
But Boeing headquarters moving out of Seattle? Impossible, most would have said a few days ago.
The goal, of course, is to "save money." A more central location for the headquarters would allow the firm to operate more efficiently in some 26 states.
Boeing, as it is in Kansas, is Washington state's biggest private employer. There are more than 78,000 workers in the Seattle area alone. worldwide, there are 198,000 employees. If the company is going to move its headquarters to "save money," how many of those workers will be let out for the same reason? "Rock solid" operations are shivering in many places.
One thing we all have to realize where business, industry and retailing are concerned. There is no longer the old "company store" format in which people can have cradle-to-grave security. Economic times, foreign competition and the shrinking world are only a few factors that have forced many mainstays of our economy to regroup or, worse, go out of business.
More and more, the Americans business-industrial-retailing complex takes on the personality of the notorious Kansas weather: Wait a little bit and it will change (not always for the better).
Hang loose and watch your back seems to be good advise for employees in any field these days.
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