CHANGING JOBS.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Statistical Data Included

The biggest employers manage to stay that way by shifting into shapes that best fit their markets.

Sitting in his office one day in 1989, Perry Jennings, senior vice president of human resources for Lowe's Cos., tried to wrap his brain around a problem. The North Wilkesboro-based home-improvement chain, which had been building 30,000-square-foot stores, was planning a 45,000-square-foot store in Boone, and more would soon follow. "I remember doing the numbers and saying, 'Where in the heck are all these people going to come from? Where are the store managers going to come from?' It was really kind of scary."

Not as scary as the alternative: Stay small and get hammered by Home Depot Inc., now the nation's No. 1 home-improvement retailer. In 1989, the Atlanta-based chain opened its first South Carolina store. In 1992, it started opening them on Lowe's home turf in North Carolina -- stores that dwarfed the 45,000-square-footers Lowe's was building.

Lowe's executives knew they had to do something. In 1991, they swallowed hard, held back $71.3 million in earnings and started replacing stores with bigger ones. At first, they tried a 65,000-foot model, then 85,000. "It was a series of different iterations we went through trying to settle on what the right-size store was," Jennings says.

These days, the typical Lowe's is 115,000 square feet. Ten years ago, the typical store might have had about 60 employees. The management team consisted of a manager, an assistant manager and five department heads. Now, each new store has about 150 employees, with five assistant managers and 15 department heads. The number of stores in the state has stayed roughly the same -- 70 then, 73 now.

By bulking up, Lowe's established itself as the nation's second-largest hardware retailer -- with 638 stores in 40 states and sales of $15.9 billion for the fiscal year that ended in January 2000. It has become North Carolina's seventh-largest employer, its massive in-store growth augmented by a doubling of jobs at headquarters to 2,400. When BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA started ranking the state's largest employers in 1991, Lowe's was 53rd with 3,900 workers. These days, roughly 13,500 Tar Heels get their paychecks from Lowe's.

Lowe's has plenty of company from other big retailers and service providers. In 1991, five of the top 10 employers, were manufacturers. In 2001, that number has Been cut in half. IBM still holds the fourth spot with 16,000 workers, the same as in 1991. Furniture Brands International is eighth, employing more than 13,000. Ruddick Corp., which is part textile maker, part grocery-store chain, holds the sixth spot with 14,000 workers. Of the state's top 100 for-profit employers, 20 are retailers and 13 are service providers, up from 16 and 11 in 1991.

The top employer, Delhaize America Inc., holding company for the Food Lion grocery chain, moved up only one place during the decade -- from second to first. But it increased its work force by 14,705, more than the current employment of all but four of the other companies on this year's list.

Food Lion's growth in North Carolina followed a path similar to Lowe's. As it expanded into more states, pushing its number of stores from 778 to 1,276, employment at headquarters increased by only 1,328. After buying Tampa, Fla.-based Kash N' Karry Food Stores Inc. in 1996 and Scarborough, Maine-based Hannaford Brothers Co. in...