Big business is large-scale, corporate-controlled, financial or business activities. As a term, it is typically used to describe activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things." The concept first arose in a symbolic sense after 1880 in connection with the combination movement that began in American business at that time. Organizations that fall into the category of "big business" include ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart, Apple, Google, Microsoft, General Electric, General Motors, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Read more about Big Business: History, Post World Wars, Criticism of Big Business
Famous quotes containing the words big business, big and/or business:
“The Americans ... have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“No way dude.”
—Chris Matheson, U.S. screen actor, Ed Solomon, U.S. screen actor, and Stephen Herek. Bill & Ted’s Big Adventure (film)
“The point is that nationalism, even in its latest madhouse frenzies under Mussolini and Hitler, is still, like advertising, an arm of big business. Nations as we know them today, were the invention of business and it is natural that business should still consider itself slightly above patriotism and that the strongest international should still be the international of profits.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)