Wikimedia Commons/Amerique
‘If you’re an actor, you go to Hollywood. If you’re in logistics, you go to Chicago.’
That’s BlueGrace Logistics CEO Bobby Harris, commenting to Crain’s Chicago Business on the centrality of the Midwest metropolis — traditionally the U.S.’s railway hub — to the growing logistics industry.
There was a time, it’s (arguably) worth noting, that both sentences in Harris’s quotation could have ended with the name of the Second City. Before the movie business truly boomed, and decamped for sunny Southern California, Chicago was the dominant locality in a then-nascent industry. (The home base of Essanay Studios, for which Charlie Chaplin made several of his pre-talkies, still stands in Chicago’s Uptown section, today housing a small private college with an emphasis on vocational training for immigrant students.)
But, yes, nowadays: logistics. Chicago is home to the UPS unit Coyote Logistics, Echo Global Logistics and numerous other players large and small, as well as remaining in the hunt for “HQ2,” the planned co-equal headquarters of a company, Amazon.com , that may have a lot to say about the shape of the shipping and logistics businesses in the coming decades.
Harris’s BlueGrace, which reportedly plans 80 hires for a location at Chicago’s historic Board of Trade building, itself is headquartered in Tampa.