As if we needed another reason to disrupt Amazon
By Edward W. Mandel
You might have heard: Amazon named the location for its “second headquarters”.
If you haven’t then probably the best way to learn about it is through Saturday Night Live guest host Steve Carell’s “sick burn”. Regardless of your politics — and SNL’s is abundantly clear — this is a hoot. Carell’s characterization of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a lot more sympathetic than the treatment he’d get from the IOU.io team but, even so, we all got a chuckle out of it.
The upshot is this: Amazon announced that it would select a city that would serve as its co-command center. The chosen location would find itself with 50,000 shiny, new, six-digit jobs and a $5 billion construction budget. The others would get, I don’t know, maybe a year of free Prime Video.
The sweepstakes ended in a tie between the Crystal City section of Washington, D.C., suburb Arlington, Va., and the Long Island City section of New York City’s Borough of Queens.
Cue the outrage from right, left and center.
“… coastal elites …!”
“… corporate welfare …!”
“… hey, what about us …?!”
At IOU, we’re neither shocked nor surprised. We are dismayed, but we’ve been that with Amazon since we started this venture.
So, Rest of the World, welcome. It’s our privilege to share with you yet one more reason blockchain needs to disrupt this ecommerce near-monopoly.
Another ‘rigged election’
Does anyone really doubt that either New York and Washington was going to end up with the prize? The only minor revelation is that Bezos was able to chop the baby in two and have both sides happy. Even King Solomon couldn’t pull that off.
SNL suggests that Bezos was “trolling” Donald Trump by zeroing in on the president’s home town and current seat of power, but that’s a stretch. The Donald was probably still just another harlequin in the clown car that is the American primary election campaign season.
The official launch date for the HQ2 search was September 7, 2017, but that’s not because the Seattle eight-million-square-foot campus ran out of room on September 6. This had to have been planned for quite some time.
From that kickoff date, cities were given little more than a month to get their proposals in to Amazon, and 238 did so. Non-U.S. or -Canada locales needed not apply.
And did they ever put on the dog! As soon as these municipalities found out in January that they were on the short list of 20 finalists, they kicked into campaign mode.
An Atlanta suburb agreed to cede 345 acres to the company so that it could actually establish the Town of Amazon. The mayor of Kansas City, Mo., bought 1,000 items from Amazon and gave each a five-star review. (I couldn’t name 1,000 things I bought in my entire life that deserve a five-star review.) A Tucson, Ariz., suburb sent a 21-foot saguaro to Amazon — which is pretty cruel to the plant when you consider that Seattle sits in a whole lot chillier and wetter a climate than cacti thrive in.
Meanwhile, a couple towns caught on early that the fix was in. Little Rock, Ark., “broke up” with Amazon with an open letter titled, “It’s not you, it’s us.” Still, it was San Antonio, Texas, that hit the nail on the head with its official response:
“It’s hard to imagine that a forward-thinking company like Amazon hasn’t already selected its preferred location. And if that’s the case, then this public process is, intentionally or not, creating a bidding war amongst states and cities.”
Did Pittsburgh or Nashville or Indianapolis really have a shot? Of course not. It was always going to be Washington or New York or possibly Los Angeles or Dallas. It could’ve been San Francisco, if the city bothered to bid. But those are the places the workforce wants to be. You can tell because that’s where it already is. These are not communities that really need new jobs.
The secondary markets were just leverage so that Amazon could tell America’s political and economic capitals, “If you don’t give us everything we need, we know a dozen or so legit cities with international airports and leading universities that would jump through flaming hoops to land this deal.”
It was an open secret. Amazon can’t even deny it. As five of the 18 finalists — after Little Rock and San Antonio withdrew — the Wall Street Journal had no problem finding sources to accurately report the story. And it was the Washington Post — which, by the way, Bezos owns — that broke the story Crystal City was likely to get the nod. All Amazon had to say about that was a tweet that the leaker should “stop treating the NDA you signed like a used napkin,” according to Ad Age.
Critical mass of massive criticism
So as anticlimax became denouement, it wasn’t long before the critics of this drama filed their reviews.
Starting January 3, Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will represent a district adjacent to that containing Amazon’s new digs in Long Island City.
“We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this,” the Left’s new poster girl tweeted. “The community’s response? Outrage. Amazon is a billion-dollar company. [She meant “trillion”. Cut her some slack, she’s new.] The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”
After years of the disintegration of civil discourse in America, I’ll take it as a hopeful sign that The American Conservative’s Daniel Kishi sings pretty much the same tune, calling the whole deal a “swindle”.
“A corporation valued at $1 trillion, critics claimed, should not be privy to taxpayer-funded handouts,” he writes. “And yet, government officials in New York and Virginia did precisely that: the combined package includes tax breaks and subsidies worth more than $2 billion.”
But wait, he goes further, noting the outrage that middle America should rightly feel as a result of Bezos’s slight.
“Amazon’s decision to expand its footprint in the New York City and Washington, D.C. metro areas did not silence its critics. In fact, with the economic disparity between coastal enclaves and the rest of the country deepening, the common refrain was that the deal will only make the rich richer,” Kishi continues. “The selection, then, is par for the course: according to the Economic Innovation Group, the two regions accounted for almost half of the net increase in the nation’s business establishments from 2007 to 2016. That’s good news for the high-earning, well-educated winners of the 21st-century information economy; it’s bad news for regions left behind, and for those whose rising cost of living already outpaces their ability to pay for it.”
3 HQs too many
Here at IOU, we’re all about disintermediation. As ecommerce becomes tokenized, we don’t see the need to get between you and the individual you’re buying from or selling to.
I honestly don’t know how we’d ever need the 8 million square feet of office space Amazon currently occupies in Seattle, no less the 8 million additional square feet it’s splitting between Queens and Arlington. I can’t imagine us hiring 40,000 staffers — the current Amazon HQ headcount — no less the 50,000 to be onboarded after the buildout.
Not for nothing, but Arlington is also the home of another famed headquarters building: The Pentagon. The strongest military the world has ever seen gets by with a central staff of 23,000 occupying 3.7 million square feet of office space. So why does Amazon need the headcount of the entire U.S. Coast Guard to deliver my tablet, phone and standing desk?
I don’t know, but that’s why I take it as a challenge to show Jeff Bezos that his entire business could be run from a tablet, phone and standing desk.
Edward W. Mandel is a strategic advisor for IOU.io , he is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, Blockchain Enthusiast and visionary behind many successful organizations. An avid entrepreneur, Edward has a knack for designing distinctive business models complemented with superior technology to deliver unparalleled service and profitability. Edward also has been advising and consulting for various successful Blockchain technology and ICO projects and recently launched his own BQT.io P2P Hedge Exchange helping traders connect with each other to leverage their crypto assets.
IOU is a blockchain-based peer-to-peer platform designed to unify ecommerce transaction and customer retention processes, incorporating trade-able IOUs. It is currently raising capital through ICO. The platform can be found online at IOU.io and its community on Telegram at https://t.me/IOUCommunity.
