The unemployment rate went up to 4.8% despite the addition of 243,000 payroll jobs. Net revisions to December and January were reduced by -18,000 from previous estimates, minor in the grand scheme of things. More people working than ever in the history of the United States? Nah, that’ll never be in the headlines. How can the unemployment rate go up with so many new jobs added? Because of people who are encouraged by the improved prospects of finding work. Since the equation uses workers plus those looking for work as its denominator, any time the number of people seeking employment increases, there's a good chance that the unemployment rate will go up despite increasing employment.

More importantly for me, the number of net new businesses (business formations less business closures) over the past 12 months went up yet again. It’s almost double what the rate was in April 2003, with more than 900,000 new businesses being formed every year.

In a recent PrintForecast Perspective and in my blog, I discussed the relationship of e-commerce and commercial printing. Statistically, for every 0.1% change in the share that e-commerce represents of retail sales, there is a downward change in the value of U.S. commercial printing shipments of $1.8 billion. If we could just stop e-commerce, I joked to myself, we'd be just fine. Since the time I wrote those words, Forrester Research released a report about the buying patterns of major companies that said, “Shifting customer interactions to the Web was a top priority.” It seems that this e-commerce thing isn’t going to stop until each and every one of us is a well-trained order-entry clerk.