27 Archer Daniels Midland - for me. I have no idea what they do, although Midland sounds sorta familiar to me. I’ll look them up and see.
It’s cool to see UPS in the top 50 (just, at #50). When I was younger, had a young family and was putting myself through college I loaded their trucks (the 40-foot trailers - I think they called them “feeders”) for a couple of years. On the 11pm-2am shift, you had to bust your buns and hustle, but it was a great job, great pay at the time, and best of all I had full benefits for the wife and young kids. This was in San Francisco, at 16th & Potrero, and they’re still there.
I think it’s a little wider than that (plus they were headquartered in Decatur until recently):
ADM sponsors one of the Sunday morning network interview shows, I forget which one. Even if you skip the commercials, they name the sponsor(s) at the beginning and/or end of the show so many people recall if nothing else the announcer intoning “ADM, supermarket to the world.”
There was a movie a few years back starring Matt Damon about price-fixing by ADM, although more about the crazy pathological liar who became … The Informant!
CVS is #12. Which shocked the hell out of me. Yes, CVS seems to be the Starbucks of pharmacies, it’s not whether or not you have a CVS near you, but how many. Me, I have 3 CVS’s within a 5min drive, and one more on the way.
McKesson for me too, but I have worked for 3 of the ones on this list, 106 Mc Donalds, 126 Raytheon and 387 Seaboard, which is headquartered in my town. I had never heard of it until I applied for a job there only to find out it was a multi-billion dollar a year shipping and milling company. It made #500 in 2011 and I was suprised to see it up the list like this. (I hated my job there, not because the company was bad to work for, but because they hired me to head their CAD department, then pulled that and put me in the purchasing dept full time. They fired me 8 months later because I wasn’t a good fit. Duh.)
AmerisourceBergen. I’ve only heard of McKesson because I review medical bills every day in my line of work, though. I’m quite surprised they weren’t first on nearly everyone’s list.
Number 14, I’ve never heard of by that name (United Health Group). I live a block from a Valero gas station and convenience store, so they are in my face. I think Valero is a new name for a conglomerate of merged oil and gas industries. A lot of Valero gas stations used to be Circle K, a chain second to Seven-eleven, now renames Stripes, and like Circle K, often has a home-cooked lunch counter.
CVS is really that big because of its pharmacy benefit management and mail order services. In terms of retail pharmacies, Walgreens’ is bigger by both location numbers and revenues (though CVS has aggressively expanded since the early 90s, buying up smaller chains like Eckerd.)
It would have been McKesson for me, except I worked there for a couple of years. Never heard of them before I applied for a job in a sea of recruiters.
The actual one I don’t know is Express Scripts Holding
Valero was the answer for me as well. I was going to say that I’d never heard of them at all. But looking at the wikipedia article about them, their gas station logo does look vaguely familiar. There are no Valero stations around here, but I’ll bet that I’ve seen them when traveling. May have even filled up at one, for all I know.
I know Express Scripts because I get all my prescriptions through them, as required by my health plan. At first we got our prescriptions through a company called Medco, but apparently Express Scripts bought them. Whatever you might want to say about Express Scripts, their service is miles better than Medco’s was!
I had heard of Berkshire Hathaway before, and vaguely knew it as Warren Buffet’s company. Recently (and I mean like within the past month), I’ve started seeing Berkshire Hathaway as the name of a real estate agency. You know, like on “For Sale” signs in front of houses. I get the impression this is an area they’re expanding into, possibly only in limited areas of the country.
OK, kidding. Actually, Express Scripts Holding (20), then Energy Transfer Equity, LP (54).
I guess location does has something to do with likelihood of recognition. I live in an area where the nearest filling station to my house is branded Valero, and I work in a building that is mostly occupied by McKesson, complete with ten-foot-high letters visible from the freeway, so I was somewhat bemused to see those mentioned so often.
I think that’s because McKesson and Cardinal don’t really deal with the consumer directly. ExpressScripts does, but only for those whose insurance companies contract with it, so some people may never have interacted with it.
My wife is a doctor at a big health care center. I asked her if she knew who McKesson was, and even she said No. I would imagine she uses products supplied by them but just doesn’t know or care much where they came from.
Oddly enough, I only knew about McKesson because they used to own Sparkletts, a local bottled water delivery company. I believe it has only been in the last six months that I had heard of them in any other capacity. I know of ADM because they have sometimes been a sponsor of NPR programming.
Energy Transfer Equity (#54) is the first company I’ve never heard of in any capacity.
Bill: “So how’s life? Still working at ETE?”
Joe: “Yep. Having lots of adventures transferring energy equity.”
Bill: “Wow, is it hard?”
Joe: “Nope, but it’s pretty equitable!”
