Wholesale trade
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in wholesale trade, and how that share has moved over five years.
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Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in wholesale trade. This describes the composition of the surrounding job market, not its scale.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as comprising "establishments engaged in wholesaling merchandise, generally without transformation, and rendering services incidental to the sale of merchandise." It notes that "the wholesaling process is an intermediate step in the distribution of merchandise," and that wholesalers "are organized to sell or arrange the purchase or sale of (a) goods for resale (i.e., goods sold to other wholesalers or retailers), (b) capital or durable nonconsumer goods, and (c) raw and intermediate materials and supplies used in production" (2022 NAICS Manual).
The defining feature for reading this share is that wholesalers sell to businesses rather than to the public. Their premises are chosen for freight access, land cost, and proximity to the customers they supply, not for visibility to passers-by, so wholesale employment concentrates along corridors and in industrial districts rather than in retail frontage. A place with a high wholesale share sits inside a distribution network for goods produced elsewhere, which links it to the fortunes of the industries it supplies.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Jobs are counted at the workplace rather than at the worker's residence, so this measures what kind of work is done near a tract, not what its residents do.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so published small-area values are perturbed relative to the underlying counts.
Coverage is jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
The boundary between this sector and transportation and warehousing depends on what an establishment primarily does — taking ownership and selling merchandise on one side, moving and storing goods for others on the other. Firms that do both are classified by their primary activity, so the two shares are best read together.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there carry no value rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so this share can rise because wholesale employment grew or because other sectors contracted.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf