Supply chain News and trends

Southern California’s Inland Empire -- a vast desert area east of Los Angeles, including Riverside and San Bernardino Counties -- is home to the nation’s biggest concentration of warehouses. They are the first stop for imported goods arriving through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach from Asia, on their way to big-box retailers’ distribution centers and stores nationwide. Nearly half of all imports to the U.S. pass through the region.

Every day, tens of thousands of warehouse workers across Southern California move these goods by hand or forklift on hot, dusty, sometimes-dangerous loading docks. The work is low-skill and low-wage and often performed by temporary workers who have little prospect of training or advancement.

Contrast that with work at the spanking-new Skechers shoe warehouse in Moreno Valley, California, at the southeastern edge of the Inland Empire, about sixty miles from Los Angeles.