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Old 05-07-2018, 11:41 PM
 
474 posts, read 1,453,467 times
Reputation: 747

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Some interesting (and some ill-informed) takes in this thread.

Amazon isn't 'leaving'. They'll diversify, and they'll fight for the best possible go-forward path they can get from the city. When you establish a base of 40k+ highly-educated, highly-paid employees that live in a place that they actually want to live, the threat to actually pull up stakes rings more than a little hollow.

Hypothetically, if they left, all of the other tech firms that are either based here or that have set up satellite shops here would vacuum up Amazon talent at an astonishing rate. The incestuous nature of the tech industry is already established - if one big firm disappears, the talent has plenty of landing places to go that wouldn't require moving across the country and pulling their kids out of schools, leaving family behind, etc.

Amazon is ridiculous in a lot of ways - in particular, their lack of civic involvement as a corporation is galling as a 3rd-generation Northwesterner (yes, I'm aware of Mary's place) - but they are a necessary check on the excesses of the city council and mayor. They should push back, and they are. Neither side is right, and the answer will lie in the middle.

"might leave Seattle" is nonsense.
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Old 05-10-2018, 11:04 AM
 
42 posts, read 60,559 times
Reputation: 33
Quote:
Originally Posted by SaltyDawg View Post
Some interesting (and some ill-informed) takes in this thread.

Amazon isn't 'leaving'. They'll diversify, and they'll fight for the best possible go-forward path they can get from the city. When you establish a base of 40k+ highly-educated, highly-paid employees that live in a place that they actually want to live, the threat to actually pull up stakes rings more than a little hollow.

Hypothetically, if they left, all of the other tech firms that are either based here or that have set up satellite shops here would vacuum up Amazon talent at an astonishing rate. The incestuous nature of the tech industry is already established - if one big firm disappears, the talent has plenty of landing places to go that wouldn't require moving across the country and pulling their kids out of schools, leaving family behind, etc.

Amazon is ridiculous in a lot of ways - in particular, their lack of civic involvement as a corporation is galling as a 3rd-generation Northwesterner (yes, I'm aware of Mary's place) - but they are a necessary check on the excesses of the city council and mayor. They should push back, and they are. Neither side is right, and the answer will lie in the middle.

"might leave Seattle" is nonsense.
Completely agree. Some of the hot takes on this thread are laughable.

I don't want to go through each post but I have to correct some of these misinformed statements:

Amazon doesn't have any fulfillment centers in Washington. This is flat out wrong. Within the greater Puget sound area, Amazon currently has over 20 FCs including Sortable, nonSortable, AmazonFresh, PrimeNow, VendorFlex and Supplemental FCs. Additionally, they recently purchased more land in Kent from Boeing to build more facilities.

Amazon is stopping construction on all Seattle buildings and not taking any more office space Nope, the news last week was that they are halting construction on Block 18 and considering subleasing Rainier Tower. While these are two massive projects, they are still working on the third tower of their HQ which will add another 1M sq feet of office space. They also are planning to take up 475,000 sq feet in the Macy's building downtown.

Amazon is an "IT company" Just getting picky here but Amazon is not an IT company. They are an e-commerce and cloud computing company.
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Old 05-10-2018, 06:00 PM
 
Location: Embarrassing, WA
3,405 posts, read 2,714,752 times
Reputation: 4412
"considering subleasing Rainier Tower"

They can easily continue to do this, and move out of Seattle proper. A sub $20M a year company will lease the space, and then the taxes those companies would have paid are gone.
This is the typical liberal BS that has been going on for years. More and more taxes wanted from a shrinking tax base...."oh no now the tax income has gone down, so we need more taxes"...and then more companies relocate to where it's favorable for them and the jobs go with them.
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Old 05-11-2018, 01:19 PM
 
11,086 posts, read 8,522,995 times
Reputation: 6392
Maybe the council wants Amazon to have a smaller operation in Seattle.
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Old 05-11-2018, 02:44 PM
 
Location: Nashville
3,533 posts, read 5,811,066 times
Reputation: 4708
Quote:
Originally Posted by SeahawksLOB View Post
Completely agree. Some of the hot takes on this thread are laughable.

I don't want to go through each post but I have to correct some of these misinformed statements:

Amazon doesn't have any fulfillment centers in Washington. This is flat out wrong. Within the greater Puget sound area, Amazon currently has over 20 FCs including Sortable, nonSortable, AmazonFresh, PrimeNow, VendorFlex and Supplemental FCs. Additionally, they recently purchased more land in Kent from Boeing to build more facilities.
Where is the core of Amazon's distribution and fulfillment centers?
https://blog.taxjar.com/amazon-warehouse-locations/


They are all over and most of them are not in Washington, even though Washington has quite a few of them. Well, of course they would, as Amazon's headquarters are in Washington state. However, Amazon is hardly married to its fulfillment centers. Many of its largest warehouses are not in Washington state. It would not make sense demographically either, as Amazon ships all over the country and even the world and the Midwest and East Coast have much more business activity than the West Coast region, as a whole.


Quote:
Originally Posted by SeahawksLOB View Post
Amazon is stopping construction on all Seattle buildings and not taking any more office space Nope, the news last week was that they are halting construction on Block 18 and considering subleasing Rainier Tower. While these are two massive projects, they are still working on the third tower of their HQ which will add another 1M sq feet of office space. They also are planning to take up 475,000 sq feet in the Macy's building downtown.
Amazon renting out the second largest skyscraper in Seattle is a real foot in the face of the Seattle city government. This is Jeff Bezos way of say "********* SEATTLE". If you cannot see this is a form of hostility then you are pretty short-sighted. Amazon is actually not married to the hunks of concrete in downtown Seattle or South Lake Union as people think. In fact, Amazon probably has more employees and offices in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and other locations around the globe than it has in Seattle. You don't see the whole offshore aspect of this company. As well, Amazon's earnings are so high, overhead so low, that ditchign the real estate and renting it out to other companies would be actually quite simple and not result in any loss of the company's revenue, even for one year. That is right, even if Amazon's real estate burned to the ground and they had no insurance, Amazon still would be making billions of dollars in profit that very year.



Quote:
Originally Posted by SeahawksLOB View Post
Amazon is an "IT company" Just getting picky here but Amazon is not an IT company. They are an e-commerce and cloud computing company.
Seriously? If you think that E-Commerce and Cloud computing are not IT related than I think you really don't understand the concept of what Information Technology truly is. Cloud computing is one of the core fields of IT and E-Commerce is completely IT related as it revolves around running a marketplace completely on the internet and requires significant amount of IT resources, more than almost any other type of IT business. Amazon is literally the epitome of all IT companies. If you think EC2 servers and Amazon cloud Operation system that is one of the largest revenue earners for this company has nothing to do with IT, then I guess the term IT is pretty much defunct. So, they are a non-IT cloud computing and sophisticated cloud marketplace company..



People don't realize that Amazon actually makes a good chunk of its profit from its cloud servers and it is one of the most important parts of the company and what it has invested more resources in than just about any other area. In fact, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle are all at each other's throats fighting to have the dominant cloud platform which may be the one determining factor of which company will prevail over the other in the next decade.

The only non-IT aspect of Amazon's E-Commerce business is the physical goods it stores in warehouses and distributes. However, storing items in warehouses is hardly any significant overhead for a company like Amazon. They could in one week relocate all the warehouses to anywhere in the world they wanted and the goods with them. Amazon has a GDP that is greater than many counties in this world. Relocating its warehouses out of Washington state would be a cake walk. In fact, most of Amazon's warehouses are not even located in Washington state. Neither are all of its server farms. What Amazon has in Washington state is a lot of its corporate offices and is where all the big wigs, board of directors and other executives live and pay their taxes. That could easily be transferred to another city. These wealth elites probably don't have just one home in Seattle, either, but homes all over the country. Remember, it is the highest wage earners in the company who make the biggest portion of the company's profits.
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Old 05-14-2018, 05:10 PM
 
16 posts, read 19,319 times
Reputation: 17
If they left it would make me so happy!!
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Old 05-14-2018, 05:55 PM
 
3,592 posts, read 1,783,795 times
Reputation: 4725
They actually passed this labor penalty law! HAHAHAHA. This is such a bad idea, this theory of taxation is completely discredited.
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Old 05-14-2018, 06:32 PM
 
235 posts, read 268,646 times
Reputation: 407
Quote:
Originally Posted by playtrix View Post
If they left it would make me so happy!!
Smh
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Old 05-14-2018, 07:38 PM
 
3,117 posts, read 4,577,423 times
Reputation: 2880
Quote:
Originally Posted by SaltyDawg View Post
Some interesting (and some ill-informed) takes in this thread.

Amazon isn't 'leaving'. They'll diversify, and they'll fight for the best possible go-forward path they can get from the city. When you establish a base of 40k+ highly-educated, highly-paid employees that live in a place that they actually want to live, the threat to actually pull up stakes rings more than a little hollow.

Hypothetically, if they left, all of the other tech firms that are either based here or that have set up satellite shops here would vacuum up Amazon talent at an astonishing rate. The incestuous nature of the tech industry is already established - if one big firm disappears, the talent has plenty of landing places to go that wouldn't require moving across the country and pulling their kids out of schools, leaving family behind, etc.

Amazon is ridiculous in a lot of ways - in particular, their lack of civic involvement as a corporation is galling as a 3rd-generation Northwesterner (yes, I'm aware of Mary's place) - but they are a necessary check on the excesses of the city council and mayor. They should push back, and they are. Neither side is right, and the answer will lie in the middle.

"might leave Seattle" is nonsense.

Most of those "40K" came from other parts of the country, and have no ties to Seattle. Not only that, but given Amazon's turnover, them up and moving would hardly even be seen as disruptive in terms of the employees that would elect to leave the company and stay in the area.

But no, they won't leave. They're simply too ingrained here to do that, the same way Boeing hasn't been able to completely break free of the area. But expect hiring to slow to a stall, and any future development to be somewhere else. Also expect them to replace attrition workers with workers in other places as they gradually wind down their exposure.

Your hypothetical is kind of...a terrible argument, as well...because it assumes that the other tech companies aren't going to give Seattle some side-eye and go elsewhere, anyways. Seattle was already approaching critical mass because the cost of living was scaring people away - expect the population to decline from this point on.

If you have property in the area, might be a good idea to sell right about now, because it's officially topped off and there's gonna be some inventory showing up following this trainwreck.
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Old 05-14-2018, 07:43 PM
 
Location: West Coast
1,889 posts, read 2,191,446 times
Reputation: 4345
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanathos View Post
Most of those "40K" came from other parts of the country, and have no ties to Seattle. Not only that, but given Amazon's turnover, them up and moving would hardly even be seen as disruptive in terms of the employees that would elect to leave the company and stay in the area.

But no, they won't leave. They're simply too ingrained here to do that, the same way Boeing hasn't been able to completely break free of the area. But expect hiring to slow to a stall, and any future development to be somewhere else. Also expect them to replace attrition workers with workers in other places as they gradually wind down their exposure.

Your hypothetical is kind of...a terrible argument, as well...because it assumes that the other tech companies aren't going to give Seattle some side-eye and go elsewhere, anyways. Seattle was already approaching critical mass because the cost of living was scaring people away - expect the population to decline from this point on.

If you have property in the area, might be a good idea to sell right about now, because it's officially topped off and there's gonna be some inventory showing up following this trainwreck.
let's also not forget developers have been building at a ferocious rate, and recently we've seen some stalling in the rental prices/increases in the city. I knew it was bad when I was back in LA in November and SD in March and saw some homes in the neighborhood with for sale signs and though "hmm not bad, that'd be $150k more in Seattle and sold by now..." Definitely not infinitely sustainable as many here would have you believe.
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