If one is good, two are better, right? Some cities in the United States and Canada think so. They are vying to become #2.
Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is expanding. It’s bursting out of its Seattle headquarters, so the company is hunting for a second home. Must haves: a large population, mass transit, and space to grow.
The company says it will spend more than $5 billion to build another headquarters in North America. (That’s about the amount Los Angeles expects to spend to host the 2028 Olympics.) The new HQ will house about 50,000 full-time employees. Amazon will still stay in its Seattle headquarters. But founder and CEO Jeff Bezos projects the new space will be “a full equal.”
With the lure of so many jobs, city leaders lined up to apply to host the development. Among the interested urban locales: Chicago, Philadelphia, and Toronto. Amazon took online applications. The corporate giant will make a decision in 2018.
Its requirements rule out some places. Amazon needs to tap a workforce with a variety of skills, experience, and technical talent. So it wants a metropolitan area with more than a million people to draw from. It needs an international airport and direct access to mass transit. The space to expand that headquarters to eight million square feet is also key in the decision. That’s about the same size as its current Seattle home.
“They’re running out of room” in Seattle, says Kevin Sharer. He is a corporate strategy professor at Harvard Business School.
Amazon said the average pay for all those new HQ2 positions will be more than $100,000 per year. That has huge potential for the financial outlook of even a major city. In return, the company hopes for perks from its second hometown: tax breaks, grants, and other incentives.
Amazon already gets incentives for its massive warehouses. The packing and shipping locations are spread all over the United States. The company received at least $241 million in tax subsidies (monetary gifts to promote business) in 2015 and 2016.
Amazon said on its site that it wanted “to find a city that is excited to work with us and where our customers, employees, and the community can all benefit.”
Work does bring benefits to a community. God gifted people with a variety of interests and abilities. He desires for us to use them productively. “He has filled them with skill to do every sort of work” says Exodus 35:35.
