Just looked up some older employment data and it's wild how concentrated things are. Walmart still dominates as the biggest employer in the US by a huge margin - 2.3 million people globally, over $570 billion in annual revenue. Amazon's right behind them with 1.3 million employees and around $470 billion. Together they employ more people than some entire countries.

What's interesting is how the biggest employer in the us varies by state. Walmart leads in 22 states, but even in their home base of Arkansas, they only have about 11,700 people in Bentonville. The data I found was from 2021, so things have probably shifted since then, but the pattern was pretty clear - healthcare and research operations dominate in a lot of states, especially for round-the-clock services. Tourism-dependent states like Hawaii and Nevada had hotels as their biggest employers.

If you're job hunting, it might be worth checking what the biggest employer in your state actually is. Albertsons was leading in Idaho with 270,000 employees at their headquarters location. The smallest was a marine services company in Alaska with under 2,000 people. Seems like knowing who's actually hiring in your region could help you land something more stable, especially with how uncertain things have been economically.