The Post-Gazette's annual Top 50 in Business section is not unlike the performance reviews many companies conduct to gauge where their employees stand. We start with the public companies in the region and measure their performance on everything from change in stock price to net income and revenue. Call it our report card of Pittsburgh's employers. How did they do? (03/22/2011)

When Wal-Mart, the world's pre-eminent retail juggernaut and its largest private employer, stops growing in the United States, everybody notices. Wal-Mart's same-store growth has fallen for seven straight quarters, and the most recent sales drop, reported Feb. 22, was the most disappointing of all as analysts had expected modest improvement. (03/22/2011)

Perhaps rather than calling it the Great Recession, Pittsburghers would be better to refer to this last economic dip as the Middling Recession. That's because while Pittsburgh did feel the reverberations from the recession, the dominant influence of education and health care on the local economy cushioned the region as the economy fell. (03/22/2011)

Trucks bearing "beer fridges" from basements across Western Pennsylvania pull up on a regular basis to a nondescript building in Thorn Hill Industrial Park, a 925-acre development straddling the Allegheny/Butler county line. Inside that building, the appliances are taken apart with the parts recycled or disposed of properly. (03/22/2011)

Janice Webb Donatelli walked down Lawrenceville's Butler Street, picked up a discarded cardboard beer box and stuffed it into the trash before walking into the cafe she founded about a decade ago, but sold shortly thereafter. Ms. Donatelli now owns Artemis, a store that sells environmentally sustainable building supplies. It is her third business to be located in Lawrenceville. (03/22/2011)