The chicken giant Tyson Foods is the latest in a long line of powerful companies fleeing Chicago and its extreme liberal policies under Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Tyson will be closing its downtown Chicago office and nearby Downers Grove office, and moving them all to its global headquarters in Arkansas. A third office in South Dakota will also join in the move.
Tyson joins Boeing, Caterpillar, and several others in its decision to flee the rampant increase in crime seen under progressive Mayor Lori Lightfoot. While Tyson did not cite crime statistics in its politically correct public release explaining the move, many other companies have.
“We have violent crime that’s happening in our restaurants … we’re seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinsk said in a scathing mid-September speech that criticized Chicago brass for the city’s current state and how it is scaring away businesses and companies.
“We’re having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants…So we see in our restaurants, every single day, what’s happening in society at large.”
The Daily Mail reports that Boeing, Caterpillar and Citadel have all announced “plans to move out of Chicago in recent months – almost three years into the city’s unprecedented crime wave”:
Chicago‘s richest billionaire Ken Griffin, who heads hedge fund Citadel, bought a record-breaking $106.9 million waterfront estate in Miami upon announcing his plans to move his more than 2,600 staffers from their office in crime-ridden Chicago.
The company had been located in the Illinois area for the last three decades but left due to escalating crime and violence in the state.
Construction manufacturer, Caterpillar, is also in the process of moving its Deerfield offices, in a suburb just outside the city, to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Aircraft giant Boeing moved from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, and this May announced it was moving again – this time to Arlington, Virginia.
Tyson has also suffered the effects of inflation in its recent earnings reports, recently stating that ‘demand for chicken is extremely strong,’ and that demand for its higher-priced cuts, of meats such as beef, has lessened.