Three early 2013 rankings and reports offer some guidance from the fringes of the site selection matrix.
“America’s Most Literate Cities,” authored by Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, and conducted in collaboration with the Center for Public Policy & Social Research at CCSU, focuses on six key indicators of literacy in cities with 250,000 or more residents: number of bookstores, educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, periodical publishing resources, and newspaper circulation. Here are the Top 10:
A study issued Jan. 17 by the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) provides what the association calls “the first-ever comprehensive report on beer distribution companies’ total impact on national and state economies.” The report, produced by Dr. Bill Latham and Dr. Ken Lewis of the Center for Applied Business & Economic Research at the University of Delaware, finds that the beer distribution industry directly employs more than 130,000 people in the United States. Beer distributor activities contribute nearly $10.3 billion to the federal, state and local tax bases. This does not include the nearly $11 billion in federal, state and local alcohol excise and consumption taxes.
“The beer distribution sector is a hidden gem that has been tremendously undervalued in previous economic reports,” said Latham. “Fueling more than 345,000 direct and indirect jobs, beer distributors add $54 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product and offer far-reaching benefits to brewers, retailers, consumers and government agencies at all levels.”
Where does the sector effervesce the most? The report didn’t list Top 10s, but we went and crunched the numbers. The following are tops in “Total Economic Impact of Beer Distributor Operations, Investment and Community Involvement”:
Last but not least, the American Veterinary Medical Association has issued the 2012 edition of its “U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook.” At year-end 2011, 56 percent of all U.S. households owned a pet, a 2.4-percent decrease from 2006. The 10 states that had the highest percentage of pet-owning households in 2011 were Vermont (70.8 percent), New Mexico (67.6), South Dakota (65.6), Oregon (63.6), Maine (62.9), Washington (62.7), Arkansas (62.4), West Virginia (62.1), Idaho (62) and Wyoming (61.8). Eight of the 10 states had the highest percentage of pet owners over the last 10 years. South Dakota and Arkansas came into the ranks in 2011. The 10 states with the lowest percentage of pet-owning households were Rhode Island (53 percent), Minnesota (53), California (52.9), Maryland (52.3), Illinois (51.8), Nebraska (51.3), Utah (51.2), New Jersey (50.7), New York (50.6) and Massachusetts (50.4).
The most literate area — District of Columbia — had the third-lowest beer distributor impact. It also had one of the lowest rates of pet ownership, at 21.9 percent, which some might say explains a lot. But what we really want to know is, “Who’s a dog state and who’s a cat state?” The map below highlights the 10 states with the highest percentage of dog owners and cat owners at year-end 2011, with Kentucky and West Virginia showing up in both lists.
