4 ms·
I find it interesting how many of these comments are sales pitches for their chosen cities. I don't have any preferences, since I have no desire to work for Ama
by Jemaclus 9y ago
I find it interesting how many of these comments are sales pitches for their chosen cities. I don't have any preferences, since I have no desire to work for Amazon nor do I think my current city of SF is a good choice for reasons laid out in the article.
What I'm most interested in, however, is how you get around some of these problems. The article points out a number of issues:
Can even Amazon afford to pay 50,000 people on a New York or SF salary? That's going to be (almost) prohibitively expensive. They certainly can pay for a Michigan salary or an Alabama salary, but is the job market there in those places? The Philadelphia example from the beginning points out that while the city is large enough, the job growth hasn't been there for quite some time, implying that there might not be enough people to fill the needed jobs.
Could a city like Birmingham, AL or Gary, IN or Lincoln, NE support 50,000 new jobs? Are there enough available homes to house all those people? Parking spaces? What about the support jobs? For every N employees, you need M doctors or dentists or accountants or fast food workers or maids or auto mechanics to support the growing population. Are those jobs there? Are there people qualified to take those jobs? Can the new traffic be handled smoothly? I think the answer is "yes" to the above in the long term, but is Amazon going to put their HQ in an up-and-coming town and just deal with the growing pains in the short term? Or would they rather go to a larger city and skip those problems?
What about international airports? That limits it to a dozen or so cities around the country. Can Amazon survive in a place like Nashville, TN? Why or why not? Are there ways to mitigate potential problems of not being able to fly to London or Paris direct?
IMO, the potential cities themselves are much less important and much less interesting than the problems that moving a 50,000 person HQ to almost any city would cause.
- _red 9y agoHouston. Low Taxes. Low Cost of Living. International Airport. Major Port. Plenty of Housing. Universities.
- irl_zebra 9y agoAnd Amazon employees will never want to leave the campus because of the horrid weather!
- not_kurt_godel 9y agoLow-lying land! Surely you must be joking?
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI think you are getting unfairly downvoted here. Clearly low-lying land is a serious concern for any entity with a long-term planning horizon. Most floodzone land should be left for low development, such as farming.
- not_kurt_godel 9y agoYup. Why would anyone choose to build headquarters in a place that blatantly disregards dire existential threats to its people and economy with demonstrably catastrophic results?
- the_d00d 9y agoSorry...DFW over Houston. Better weather, higher elevation, significantly lower cost of living, and more people. Sources: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&city1=Houston%2C+TX&country2=United+States&city2=Dallas%2C+TX https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statist...
- sidlls 9y agoHow much are you assuming these 50,000 are going to be paid? Even at a very generous $200k/year all-in (cash+cost of benefits) average (they aren't all going to be highly paid engineers or executives) that's "only" $10bn/year. It's steep, but would amount to only about 6% of their annual revenue. Some of that 50,000 is likely to be transfers and lower wage employees.
- Jemaclus 9y agoIt's not so much what they get paid as how much they could save by going elsewhere. If you imagine a generous 200k/year average in SF or NYC, you can also imagine that it wouldn't be 200K in a place like, say, Des Moines, IA or Detroit, MI -- it might be closer to a generous 100K average, saving them $5bn/year -- or fifty percent cheaper. Just made up numbers, but it illustrates the point. If salary were the only criteria and Bezos went to the board and said, "Which would you rather pay, $10bn/year or $5bn/year for salary?" it's pretty obvious which one the board would pick. Even a janitor or desk assistant is paid more in SF and NYC than they are in Charleston, SC, so the principle applies even for low wage workers. (Now obviously, the criteria is more than just salary, so the above is an oversimplification.) That overlooks another aspect: what happens to a city when 50,000 new people show up likely making more than the average of that city? Do we get inflation? Do we have a housing crisis where all the nice houses are bought up and even the mediocre neighborhood property values skyrocket? Does gentrification become a problem? If you think "it's just 50,000 people and it's just one company," you'd be right -- but don't you think whatever city Amazon chooses is going to have a tech boom? There will be more tech jobs generated, leading to higher salaries and more expensive houses and... and... and... I think the peripheral side effects of such a move are much more interesting than the move itself. The salary thing, sure, you're right. It's only 6% of their income. But what happens if the move causes unimaginable traffic congestion or significantly increases the homeless population or puts a strain on local preschools. Fifty thousand people? Let's say a third of them have 1 kid -- that's ~17,000 to add to the local school systems! We need more teachers! We need more buses! We need more textbooks! Instant crisis! (I exaggerate, but still...) That's the kind of stuff I find to be fascinating.