Money can’t buy happiness, and apparently, in Memphis, it doesn’t have to.
We’re so happy, it just doesn’t seem to matter that we make less than other places.
Forbes recently reported that CareerBliss, an online career company that boasts that it helps people find jobs that make them happen, has named Memphis as the #6 best city on its list of the 50 happiest cities to work.
We were in incredible company:
#1 – San Jose, CA
#2 – San Francisco
#3 – Jacksonville
#4 – Miami
#5 – Washington, D.C.
#6 – Memphis
Nashville wasn’t listed.
CareerBliss evaluated eight factors that affect work happiness, growth opportunities, compensation benefits, work-life balance, career advancement, senior management, job security, and whether the employee would recommend the employer to others. The information came from an analysis from more than 200,000 independent company reviews.
“Cities which ranked high for having happy employees include Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and El Paso, Texas, which all outranked well-known metropolitan areas such as Chicago, New York, and Atlanta,” CareerBliss said.
Heidi Golledge of CareerBliss says, “There is never just one factor that contributes to overall work happiness. In the CareerBliss Happiest Cities to Work list you will find employees who not only feel they have an opportunity to grow their career, but find there is a sense of work-life balance and good compensation in the city they work.”
Back to our opener for this post, what interested us most was that of the top 12 cities, Memphis had the lowest average salary, but it was #3 in recommending their companies to others.
Here’s the category in which Memphis is #1 – job security.
At about the same time as the happiest city rankings, Forbes posted Memphis near the top of its most miserable cities list. We’re proud to say that overall, we did the best thing we could. We ignored it.
Heck, I’m even happy being unemployed in Memphis 😉
I know a ton of people are happy as hell with their posts if they are professionals here in Memphis, but so what ? that’s meaningless becasue the ones that I know, especially the transplants while loving their jobs perhaps, would MOVE in a heartbeat doing the same job in another enivonment.
Being happy at work is being happy within a protected or isolated enivironment, and has no relevance in toto with being happy with living in Memphis, TN at all.
It’s a non sequitur
A worker/professional can be perfectly ‘happy’ at his/her job everyday in Memphis, and be perfectly ‘miserable’ with the City of Memphis (or anywhere else) at the same time.
Let’s not make too much of such flimsy reasoning offered or suggested.
Interestingly, polling of Memphians across all demographics say that they are happy here.
Then let’s also not make such a to-do about flimsy rankings such as the “miserable” index.
Exactly, urbanut.
That’s why we didn’t make much of a to-do about it.
Here’s our “official” stand on city lists: http://www.smartcitymemphis.com/2010/03/closing-the-book-on-forbes-and-getting-back-to-things-that-matter/
Totally agreed per the rankings SCM.
In the end rankings are just that- they are relative. Relative is great for the NCAA tournament, but “rankings” do little to indicate how one is actually performing- how many are hungry, homeless, undereducated, etc… If our quality of life were to rise to that of say Portland’s, yet every other city rose proportionally, we would still be ranked as miserable.
“I RUN THIS PLACE DOWN WHENEVER I GET THE CHANCE.”
And that says far more about you than it does about Memphis.
So we’ve established that you’re miserable here….
Same proud, hateful, and pompous jerk, just with a different name.
Get a life, Marko (a.k.a. Joe Johnson or whatever other aliases you’ve used in the past here). All you ever do is bash Memphis at every turn with your hateful, mean spirited rhetoric just to bring people down to your OWN level of misery just so you can feel better about it.
You are SCUM, and we do not appreciate such scum who do nothing more with their lives but spew out venomous negativity and have no shame in doing so.
In terms of misery, I’ve lived in Memphis almost all of my life, and not for one second have I ever thought of it as a miserable place. Crime may be issue people like to talk about, but it happens in almost every city. Heck, I was almost a victim myself down here in Nashville when my neighbor’s apartment was broken into almost a year ago.
The way I look at it, a person is only miserable when so many things in their life do not go their way, and instead of picking themselves up, they choose to sulk in their own misfortunes.
Some residents are perfectly happy also with the status quo year in year out. Some even don’t want to be confronted with changing and growing. Some people enjoy the mediocrity of it all, too. The place hasn’t changed that much for the better since the 1980’s and everyone who has lived here for longer than 10 years knows that true for the most part. Does that make the city miserable ? I don’t know, but it sure doesn’t make Memphis a cutting edge city. I don’t plan to just live in Memphis my whole life. I can’t imagine not ever seeing and experiencing life elsewhere and learning from that. If you wear blinders you only see in front of you and I think lots of residents actually do wear those blinders every day. They seem to enjoy the view.
Memphis may be a happy place to work but according to the latest Bloomberg ranking Memphis is not the TN city to live in for raising a family. That place was mentioned way on the other side of the state. The survey says :
Best place to raise kids in Tennessee: Clinton
Nearby city: Knoxville
Population: 9,224
Median family income: $55,421
Runner-up: Hohenwald
Clinton is the county seat of Anderson County and is part of the Knoxville Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is located on the Clinch River, where plans are in place to develop the waterfront into recreational space, with hiking and bike trails. At Anderson County High School, one of three in the area, 54 percent of the students posted advanced scores in CRT results, beating the state average of 41 percent.
Hohenwald? That’s a great place to live if you want to work at the prison in Only, TN. Otherwise, try driving a long way every day to make a living.
I grew up in a town like Hohenwald in Arkansas before being reared in Collierville. It was a great place for parents to raise children because there was no trouble to get into, but it was anything but a great place for children to grow up.
I’m sure Clinton is a wonderful place, but how was this pertinent to the conversation?
Wow!
You all made this all about yourselves!
Pathetic.
All about you for denial of facts, all about you for denial of history, all about you for trying to whitewash whatever anyone thinks that you disagree with.
Both of those studies can be lethally accurate at the same time in this one place. Acknowledge the factual information.
The trick with information is that you have to understand it in context and BE informed by it, not ruled by it.
Whining and criticizing information is pointless. Act on it’s truth instead of trying to bury your heads in self righteous attempt at being above all the opinion when the opinion is all based in facts. Grow UP.
Memphis doesn’t have to be a great place, but, you can make it one, and that won’t happen by denying it’s positive and negative attributes.
It’s nice to have job security, but, only if you make enough money that it would matter.
Try to remember what Memphis was like under our last mayor, have a memory longer than a gnat’s.
Brian: Sorry you took this so personally and emotionally.
Did anyone read the FEB 2011 rankings from US NEWS and WORLD REPORT regarding the top eleven most dangerous cities ?? (not the Forbes report)
Memphis was ranked number 6.
No surprises here. Better hurry up on that branding effort, huh ? Funnny
Progress. We were #1.
SCM,
Ran the numbers for 2010 provided by Operation Safe Community. Assuming that the statistics remained static in the other cities on the list (which of course we know they did not), then Memphis would not appear on the list at all.
I think I’ll just stick to the numbers released by US NEWS, and Memphis did make the list, their list, not YOUR some numbers. Anyone can ‘run’ numbers and come up with their own spin I guess, but I was simply repeating a respected periodical source, which you’re not I would not believe.
Urbanut:
We’ve got lists that has Memphis out of the top 10 for the first time in years and years. At least we seem to be moving in the right direction.
Apparently you would not believe the FBI or the TIBRS either. You are free to check the stats yourself:
http://operationsafecommunity.org/assets/1294/dec_2010-osc_crime_trends_report.doc
These are the same stats provided to the groups that perform the rankings. We were ranked the 6th most dangerous in 2006. The crime rate continued to drop last year, remarkably in some cases.
I’ll even provide my methodology-
The “crime rate” is calculated as the number of incidents/ 1,000 residetns. Utilizing the most recent census informaiton that provides the following information:
Murder: .13
Forcable Rape: .58
Aggravated Assault: 9.83
Robbery: 4.81
Together that means Memphis has a total violent crime rate of 15.35 for the year 2010.
Now the US News & World report ranking actually gave Memphis a score of 361 where 100 is the national average “so Memphis’ score indicates its crime risk is more than three times the verage”- 3.61 times the national average in 2009. At that time the violent crime rate in the city was 18.06. If the city’s violent crime rate was 3.61 times the national average, that would mean that US News used a violent crime rate of 5.003 violent crimes/ 1000 people. With that in mind, if we take the 2010 city rate of 15.35 and divide it by the national average and multiply by 100 it would yield a score of 307 on the US News index. Cleveland & Minnieapolis were tied for 10th place in the rankings with a score of 331. Thus Memphis would have been below the 2 cities tied for 10th place and as long as another city recieved a score between 307 and 331, Memphis would not have appeared on the list.
The effect of Memphis (or any other city) merely appearing on any such list, is the salient one.
You can project or massage the methodologies all you wish, to no avail really.
The practical negative effect when a lay person, i.e. citizen, corporation, potential transplant, marketer, READS this sort of data, remains as ‘fact’.
Perception trumps reality when it comes to labeling or describing an environment (public domain).
You don’t have to be a pinhead academician or statistician to figure that one out.
Memphis loses (again). Put some more lipstick on that pig.
No lipstick, just making sure we are using actual numbers. As I said, this time next year Memphis will no longer be on the list… and you will be up to user name number 25. Perhaps you will have found a new reason to justify your compulsive negativity by that time.
FG-
You are having difficulty keeping up and that is understandable. The list you introduced into the conversation was a certain US News summary of dangerous cities. You apparently failed to actually read the article or how the numbers supporting the list were computed which was provided along with the article (no surprise). The statistics for their reasoning were based on the number of violent crimes that occurred in 2009. The number of violent crimes that occurred in 2010 is already available and I referred you to where one can find those stats in an earlier post. The lists published next year will undoubtedly rely on the 2010 statistics. Using the reports for 2010, it is very simple to use the same US News report methodology to identify what the score for Memphis would be for 2010- please note that 2010 is not next year, but was the year that preceded 2011. The list next year will similarly be based on stats produced in 2010. Really, it is very simple.