Most Recent Posts

Having trouble wrapping your head around southern Europe's staggering unemployment problem?

Look no further than a single IKEA furniture store on Spain's Mediterranean coast.

The Swedish retailer plans to open a new megastore next summer near Valencia. On Monday, IKEA's Spanish website started taking applications for 400 jobs at the new store.

The company wasn't prepared for what came next.

Within 48 hours, more than 20,000 people applied online for those 400 jobs. The volume crashed IKEA's computer servers in Spain.

"We had an avalanche of applicants!" IKEA spokesman Rodrigo Sanchez told NPR in a phone interview. "With that quantity, our servers just didn't have the capacity. They collapsed. After 48 hours, we had to temporarily close the job application process. We're working on a solution, to re-open the job page as soon as possible."

That initial volume alone gives applicants a one-in-50 chance of landing the job — three times more difficult than getting into Harvard last year.

And that's factoring in only the applicants in the first 48 hours, who managed to apply online before IKEA's servers crashed. Once IKEA gets its servers back up and running, the job application window will still stay open until Dec. 31, allowing potentially tens of thousands more job seekers to file applications, Sanchez said.

"I feel lucky to have a job. IKEA is a great company. In this case we have 20,000 initial people who want to work with us," he said. "But we know we're in this situation at least in part because of the state of the Spanish economy."

Spain's unemployment rate is 26 percent, and more than double that for youth in their 20s. Greece, Italy and Portugal also suffer from painfully high unemployment — and economists predict they will continue to do so even after they emerge from recession.

The Spanish economy posted 0.1 percent growth in the third quarter of this year, marking the official halt of recession. Exports are up, and parliament has passed critical labor reforms.

Spain's jobless rate actually dropped 1 percent this year. But that's little consolation for those IKEA job seekers. It could be years before their odds improve.

Bangladesh was created out of chaos in the early 1970s, at a moment when millions in the country were dying from a combination of war and famine. The future looked exceedingly bleak.

Abdul Majid Chowdhury and Noorul Quader were Bangladeshi businessmen who wanted to help their country. "We asked ourselves, 'What the hell do we want?' " Chowdhury recalls. The answer he and his friends arrived at: "We need employment. We need dollars."

Interactive Documentary

Anyone who has hankered for a list of 10 of the most life-affirming dog rescue stories ever can rely on the social media site BuzzFeed.

That list of 11 classic horror films that should never have been remade? That's from BuzzFeed too.

BuzzFeed's digital traffic is stratospheric: It cites Google Analytics figures that show it drew more than 130 million unique visitors to its site last month. But the social media outfit is in the process of building up a team of journalists to offer original news reporting, raising questions of just what it intends to be.

"When we look at with whom we're really competing — look at The New York Times, look at The Guardian — these are stories that people are sharing," says Ben Smith, the charismatic BuzzFeed editor-in-chief hired away from Politico two years ago. "These are meaningful stories that are advancing the news."

Under Smith, BuzzFeed has hired reporters to cover politics and culture and added reporters in Cairo, Istanbul, Russia and, most recently, Nairobi, Kenya. The promise: to offer stories with distinctive takes, not just the latest development.

Yet most visitors clearly arrive for the viral posts that made BuzzFeed famous. The conference rooms at its new Manhattan headquarters are named for some of the most important players in its early history: "No No No Cat," "Kitten with a Tiny Hat," "Birthday Cat," "Business Cat" and "Lil Bub." They are unlikely to be household names -– unless your household includes social media junkies younger than 35. As it turns out, many tens of millions of houses and apartments do.

Enlarge image i

A report from payroll company ADP finds that "the U.S. private sector added 215,000 jobs during November making it the strongest month for job growth in 2013," says the company's president and chief executive, Carlos Rodriguez.

The surge in job creation outpaced economists' estimates of 173,000 jobs for the month, according to CNBC. The last time U.S. companies added a bigger number of jobs to their payrolls was in November 2012, with 276,000 jobs, ADP says.

"The job market remained surprisingly resilient to the government shutdown and brinkmanship over the Treasury debt limit," says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, which collaborates with ADP on the report. "Employers across all industries and company sizes looked through the political battle in Washington. If anything, job growth appears to be picking up."

The ADP National Employment Report, which measures non-farm private employment, says small businesses led the way in job creation, with 102,000 jobs added.

"Goods-producing employment rose by 40,000 jobs in November, up from 29,000 in October," according to the report. "Both construction and manufacturing payrolls added 18,000 jobs apiece."

The ADP survey is seen as a bellwether for the monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is expected to release its estimate of November's unemployment rate and payroll growth on Friday.

Also Wednesday, the Census Bureau reported that America's trade gap shrank in October, on the strength of record sales to China, Canada and Mexico. The gap narrowed 5.4 percent, to $40.6 billion from $43 billion in the previous month.

From Bloomberg News:

"Sales of goods to China, Canada and Mexico were the highest ever, pointing to improving global demand that will benefit American manufacturers. In addition, an expanding U.S. economy is helping boost growth abroad as purchases of products from the European Union also climbed to a record in October even as fiscal gridlock prompted a partial federal shutdown."