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)
“Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)