By fitsnews – May 29, 2012
GRAND STRAND BRINGS UP THE REAR IN NEW EARNINGS SURVEY
Workers in Myrtle Beach, S.C. ranked at the bottom of a new earnings survey released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In fact, South Carolina’s tourism capital ranked dead last among the nation’s 387 major metropolitan areas in terms of how much money its workers make.
As of May 2011, the average worker in Myrtle Beach earned $31,360 a year. That’s less than half the $69,880 earned by the typical worker in the San Jose, California metropolitan area (which paced the nation in earnings) and $14,000 lower than the national average of $45,230.
(To view the Myrtle Beach data, click here).
How did the state of South Carolina fare as a whole?
We’ll have a report on that momentarily, but we can tell you that annual earnings in each of South Carolina’s metropolitan areas were lower than the national average.
In 2009, South Carolina’s median household income shrank by $1,600 – a 3.7 percent decline from 2008. The state’s poverty ranking also shot up to 17.1 percent in 2009 – a 10.6 percent increase from the previous year. And while those numbers were obviously tied to the national recession, income levels in South Carolina were already shrinking well before the “Great Recession” hit.
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