South Carolina's Media Engine for Economic Growth

SCBIZ - Winter II 2007 Issue

State prepares to wage battle on payday lenders

For years, Lavone Holbert drowned in debt. Struggling to raise her children by herself and pay for her own education, she lost control of her finances, plummeting in a downward spiral. She was $35,000 in debt and even though she worked full-time as a nurse, she watched her paychecks disappear before they ever settled into her bank account. She racked up credit card debt, but a significant portion of what Holbert owed was to payday lenders.

As in 2002, nature devastated the crop. There was the combination of a hot, dry summer followed by three tropical systems. This year, it was the long period of dry, hot weather, he said. While nature is taking its toll on one of the state’s major crops, its dominion also has been challenged by globalization. And in many cases, farmers are growing higher-value commodity crops like wheat instead of cotton. Baxley, whose business includes farming, ginning and warehousing cotton for both his farms and for other farms, said farmers across the state are sustaining huge losses.

Embracing our roots

A scan of the shelves in Charleston’s Home Grown Grocer won’t yield Hormel Bacon or Quaker Instant Grits. Instead, owner Tamlyn Willard stocks grits and flour from Columbia’s Anson Mills, ham and bacon from Caw Caw Creek Fine Pastured Pork in St. Matthews and fresh eggs and vegetables from Green Grocer Farms on Johns Island. In fact, everything in the store is grown, raised or produced in South Carolina.

The rich aroma of roasted coffee beans may give every customer a taste of the “Starbucks Experience,” but for a small county living in the shadow of South Carolina’s capital city, it smells a lot like money. Straying far from its home city of Seattle, Wash., the world’s largest coffeehouse company came to St. Matthews, S.C., the county seat, to find something it couldn’t get in the Pacific Northwest: Sunshine and fresh air.

“Oh, to be 45 rather than 65 today,” said Dean, owner of Dean’s LTD, an Orangeburg haberdashery that specializes in men’s and big and tall fashions and does a brisk business in tuxedo rentals and choir robes. “I’d probably be investing in some local real estate right about now.” What Dean and many others are anticipating is the arrival of Jafza International’s planned investment of $600 million in the area to develop a logistics, distribution and light manufacturing complex on 1,300 acres at the crossroads of U.S. Highway 301 and Interstate 95. The development is expected to employ up to 10,000 when completed.

While globalization and the drought have taken their toll on cotton production, that is only a piece of a larger, even drier and more brittle picture of economic distress in the state. The textile and apparel industry—intricately linked to the cotton industry as the “back-end” process that takes the sowing, growing and reaping of the cotton crop to market with finished goods—has lost about three-quarters of the jobs that it had when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.

Three against the world

Today, the Palmetto State’s three senior research institutions—the Medical University of South Carolina, Clemson University and the University of South Carolina—are making huge strides in research and development and each has lofty goals to one day rank among the nation’s top universities. All three schools tout impressive recent research-related accomplishments, and their efforts are bolstered by statewide and federal initiatives to support research activity.