How the biggies around here hired and fired; supersize me, Starbucks

Many of the region's biggest public companies recently filed their year-end regulatory reports, revealing among other things a data point that some of them don't otherwise discuss — jobs.

The numbers provide a sobering look at how sharply many of them shrank during the Great Recession. A few, though, powered right through the downturn with hiring here and elsewhere.

Weyerhaeuser reports 14,900 employees at the end of 2009 — just a sliver of the 37,900 the Federal Way company had two years earlier.

The drop reflects a steady stream of plant closures, layoffs and divestitures, the largest occurring in 2008 with sale of its Containerboard Packaging and Recycling business, which took away 14,000 employees in one fell swoop.

Paccar geared down its truck factories as sales slowed, and its work force shrank 30 percent to 15,200 at year-end from 21,800 two years prior, according to filings by the Bellevue-based company.

Among other moves, the company early last year laid off 430 of the 500 workers at its Kenworth factory in Renton, and postponed until this year the opening of a Mississippi engine plant that had been scheduled to begin manufacturing in 2009. But the grandé of cutbacks in terms of overall jobs came at Starbucks, which reported earlier with data for its fiscal-year end in September.

After adding 4,000 jobs in fiscal 2007, the Seattle-based coffee king slashed 34,000 jobs nationwide in one year, dropping from 176,000 in September 2008 to 142,000 last fall. Its U.S. operations bore the brunt of the cutbacks with 32,000 jobs lost, leaving 111,000.

Two key employers here saw their work force increase early into the recession, but then started making cuts.

Boeing's Washington state employment climbed modestly from 74,160 in December 2007 to 76,417 a year later, then the Chicago-based company trimmed it to 72,352 this past December.

And Redmond-based Microsoft's employment in the Puget Sound region peaked at 41,555 in January 2009, then dropped through layoffs and attrition to 39,637 at the end of the calendar year. Not all the job news was grim at the region's big public companies, though.

Amazon.com's boom continued. The Seattle online mega-merchant grew its year-end work force by almost 43 percent over two years, shooting from 17,000 full and part-time employees in December 2007 to 24,300 at the end of last year.

Amazon's rate of adding jobs has slowed, though — from 22.3 percent in '07 to 21.8 percent in '08 and 17.4 percent last year.

And a good chunk of the 3,600 workers it added last year came from its acquisition of Las Vegas-based shoe Web site Zappos, with a reported 1,500 employees.

The region's other retail juggernaut, Issaquah-based Costco, also increased its staff, but without acquisitions. It ended last year with 79,000 full-timers and 142,000 total employees, up from 70,000 and 127,000 two years earlier.

One surprising tidbit: Puget Energy, which went private in a buyout completed in February 2009, might have been expected to shed jobs as the economy slowed and its new owners looked for cost-cutting opportunities.

But the Bellevue company, which still makes SEC filings, reported 3,000 full-time employees at year-end, a 15 percent increase from 2,600 in February 2007.

Supersize me,

Starbucks

Starbucks is testing 31-ounce iced coffee and tea in Phoenix and Tampa.

Besides knocking Starbucks' already-whopping 20-ounce or "venti" drink on its rear, the new size comes with a new name: Trenta.

Trenta means 30 in Italian. It's hard to picture the Italian who would relish a 31-ounce coffee.

But we're in the world of Starbucks-speak here, where talls are smalls, and smalls aren't even on the menu.

Starbucks spokesman Alan Hilowitz says that unsweetened, those drinks have less than five calories.

Sweetened, they're under 200 calories.

The Trenta size is for iced tea and coffee only, not Frappuccino or other drinks.

Who wants to bet people order Trenta Frappuccinos anyway?

— Melissa Allison

Comments? Send them

to Rami Grunbaum: rgrunbaum@seattletimes.com or 206-464-8541.