Eden Prairie-based business are grabbing statewide headlines all the time. Supervalu announced today that it has acquired the Albertson’s grocery store chain, the second largest grocery store chain in the United States. Supervalu is one of our highest profile local businesses.
But we also know from the results of our 2005 Business Satisfaction Survey that the bulk of Eden Prairie’s business community is composed not just of large high profile companies, but really hundreds of small businesses. In fact, our business community might be best described with the following two facts from that survey:
- 70% of Eden Prairie’s businesses employ 10 or fewer fulltime employees.
- 24% of our businesses operate out of private homes.
Our 2005 survey repeated a business satisfaction survey first completed in 2002. We asked the survey businesses to reflect on the changes that have occurred in the local economy from 2002 to 2005. They reported the following:
- Nearly 8 out of 10 businesses gave Eden Prairie an ‘A’ or ‘B’ grade for its business climate.
- Only 11 of the 400 survey respondents gave Eden Prairie a ‘D’ or ‘F’ grade for its business climate. This number is less than half the number of respondents that gave these grades to the City in the 2002 survey.
- Only 1 in 10 of the surveyed businesses have any plans to move from Eden Prairie within the next five years. This is the same figure as the 2002 survey.
- Nearly 50% of the businesses survey have operated in Eden Prairie for more than ten years.
The City earned pretty good numbers from the business community in the 2002 survey, and that was repeated in the 2005 survey too. You can download a copy of the final report for the survey at the City’s website at www.edenprairie.org.
