Amazon dropping NY plans
For Valentine’s Day Amazon drop plans for its headquarters in New York like the USPS drops Amazon packages.
Should anyone in Nashville have some money lined up to purchase real estate in the strangely unexpected Amazon Operation Center / thrown Nashville a bone town, you might guess where this is heading.
The splitting of HQ2 into two parts was odd, and putting it in Queens was odder just logistically – you’re going to put the HQ of one of the largest companies on the planet on an island relatively limited connection to the mainland in event of, well, pretty much anything?
I lived in Long Island, don’t get me wrong no hate, but that was an odd choice compared to next to anything 20 miles west. But they’re abandoning it, evidently due to pressure against NY giving three billion in tax incentives to make Queens more crowded and congested.
NY’s tax incentives for the 25,000 employees came to about $120,000 per employee created. If it was structured like the Nashville deal that probably was over the course of 10-15 years.
Amazon has stated time and again that where they’re going they need tech talent a plenty and has passed up city after city for not being able to produce enough. I still wonder if that’s true.
There’s a joke about large companies and IT: How many highly technically skilled people does it take to change a lightbulb? One.
How many people does it take to change a lightbulb at Amazon: there’s the help desk to take the call and assign a ticket, a ticketing manager who oversees the ticket queues and makes sure the program to assign them knows who’s out sick, there’s the department that receives the ticket, the person on the local dispatch who calls up the acquisitions manager who moves a lightbulb out of storage and checks it out to a runner. The runner takes it to the drop location where it’s picked up by the technician who replaces the bulb.
Amazon’s always aimed to be the first joke and not the second.
But yeah, Queens… Long Island City… I love you man, but that was never a good place for Amazon and 25,000 more Amazon workers (+8000 spouses, 10,000 kids, 8000 related service business employees,) living in the area.
Just lack of good escape routes in a zombie apocalypse should have been a dealbreaker to begin with.
[NY Times]
