Amazon has been pretty careful about their appearances in town. A good example that I saw when I went to Seattle is the subtle shame you experience as an employee if you drive yourself to work. Supposed to carpool / do whatever else you can do so at least Amazon doesn't have to shoulder the blame for rising Seattle traffic. Probably a nice thing in the end.
Also their well-known frugality principle, while not really meaning a lot when you consider salaries, helps to stem the "entitled" image that say a company like Google gets more of.
To be fair, I've witnessed people in the Seattle area seem to subtly shame or otherwise discourage those who don't cycle or take public/shared transit in to the office, at companies and social situations outside of Amazon. A number of people in the area seem to think those who don't cycle to work, go hiking/mountaineering/skiing/kayaking/etc in free time aren't really "doing Seattle right" or something. Of course this is my generalization based on my perceptions of what I hear around this area.
I would disagree with this assessment. Most folks I knew when I lived in seattle were indifferent to how you moved around with some exceptions (gas guzzlers were always frowned upon but this was also during the highest gas prices). I used to drive then took transit when my car was hit and no one really thought anything of it either way, most being surprised I hadn't gotten another car.
Outdoor stuff was also not really forced or brought up other than offers to join or use equipment, which was very kind.
I have not gotten this impression at all in my 5 years in Seattle. There are certainly people who live the stereotypical active northwest lifestyle but I've never felt pressured to do the same by any of them.
Just people doing their thing. In a lot of these kinds of comments you see people projecting on others an awful lot. Far more often than they're actually being judged. Sorry for not being more clear.
I lived in Seattle for 10 years and never felt the tiniest hint of this. Most of that time I drove by myself. It's true that a lot of people do those recreational activities.
As uiri pointed out, transporting a family by bike is very common in other countries so it's not unrealistic at all. Though with how heavily the US is built around cars, the first wave of people trying it will have to make sure to live in the right places in the right cities.
Also, people who don't live the suburban car life typically don't buy "weekly" groceries.
It's actually usually a refrigerated van (bare in mind you'd have chilled and frozen items and those vans can be out for two hours at a time due to having multiple deliveries loaded).
But the type of vehicle is a moot point as it's not the shopper who has to own nor drive it. So they can still run a household without themselves owning a car (which was the point of the discussion)
You mean countries like Germany, Holland or Denmark?
I suggest you google for "fiets met kinderzitjes" (bike with child seats) to get examples of how you can transport 2 small children on one regular bike.
Once the children get older they can get their own bike. If you need to transport more than 2 children, get yourself a second parent or a bike that's designed to take cargo (yes I just called your children cargo).
My mother raised me and my sister on her own, using just a bike.
Seattle is a very hilly city, increasing the challenges for bike commuting for normal people. An electric bike can help but increases the price substantially.
At least in Amsterdam where I biked around a bit, it seemed flat as a pancake.
As someone who grew up in New York, people were getting their groceries delivered long before the days of online shopping, where most grocery stores provided a service at checkout where they'd bring all the groceries to your house after you selected everything, and the fees were pretty reasonable too given someone didn't need to go around the store for you.
You can cycle to work and do weekly groceries by car, you know? Or you can just do groceries more often than once a week. Or you can buy yourself a trailer for your bike, or a backfiets.
yes cars are expensive. for my local situation here im looking at 1.5hrs commute by bike one way or 3 hrs round trip...every day. plus bad winters to deal with. car is worth the convinience ... in my case.
Move closer to work you say? Any cost saving from getting rid of one car will be overshadowed by expensive home prices. Real estate is not really affordable for most folks these days....
Why would delivery be a percent of the total goods cost? NYC has had in-store grocery delivery for a either a flat fee or flat fee per bag for decades.
If your weekly groceries are like $100 and the flat delivery fee is $15, then that's 15%. You can't just buy milk for the next six months in one go to make the percentage smaller.
These seem to be quite common in Europe (especially the Netherlands but elsewhere like Germany too). With better cycling infrastructure, there is no reason that they could not catch on in North America.
Bicycle infrastructure is not something that just appears one day. Even bike Meccas like parts of the Netherlands took decades to build out that infrastructure.
I kinda see where you're coming from but it's awfully heavy handed and ultimately blames a lack of determination on having children. A good deal of people live by the bicycle, "millennial" or not. There's no virtue signaling happening here. You can either get over it or continue to have a bad attitude- it's not up to me.
Some of my other acquaintances use a bike trailer or a trail a bike instead of a cargo bike for their kids. It helps that most of Palo Alto is close to flat.
I'm not sure how carefully Amazon has or has not been managing their appearances in Seattle, but I'd bet that Seattlites in general have a WORSE opinion of Amazon than the general average opinion across the USA. I've lived in Seattle for 10 years, and I see Amazon get blamed for all kinds of stuff, certainly including traffic.
I live in Seattle and almost never hear a good thing about Amazon's presence here (people like the service though). Multiple times a week people blame Amazon for the very high rents and home prices.
Amazon employees also have a bad reputation (not individually, but collectively) in my experience. To be fair, I think that has a lot to do with over-eager college interns.
> people blame Amazon for the very high rents and home prices
In a way, they are correct. In another way, well, no. Amazon needed employees, lots of them, and hired them. Suddenly, you have increased demand for housing. The city ought to, in response, see that this is happening and do what needs to be done to increase supply of housing. Allow more density, build up, build more and do it quickly.
Instead, it's chosen the typical west-coast attitude of blaming the people bringing the jobs and wealth to the city and preventing serious density increases anywhere they can. And the citizens, the same ones complaining about housing prices, are also against any increase in density.
The end result? Well, Amazon is opening offices left and right in every other city on the planet, and hiring elsewhere. Those jobs might have been in Seattle, bringing in more local taxes, but instead they are in places like Winnipeg, Manitoba. (Seriously, there's an office there, what the heck?).
(Bias: Amazon employee, once lived in Seattle and loved the city)
Right, because Seattleites are the ones who have to actually deal with Amazon.
The efforts that the OP is talking about are meant to make Amazon appear better to the Seattleites of this universe than it would appear to the Seattleites of some alternate universe in which Amazon wasn't making the same efforts.
That's a wholly different goal than making Amazon appear better to Seattleites than it does to residents of other cities.
I'm not sure what efforts OP is referring to. I'm not aware of any. Either way, OP makes it sound like Amazon doesn't get blamed for all kinds of things (it does) and like people in Seattle don't think Amazon has entitled employees. I hear both complaints constantly.
I'm contending that Amazon has approximately the same reputation in Seattle that Google has in the Bay Area.
Its a reasonable guess, but my onservation is you are wrong. Seattleites are generally enjoying these boom times, where jobs are plentiful and even waiting tables pays $15/hr. People seem to quietly appreciate the Amazon effect, it isn't remarked upon often compared to other issues of the day.
$15 and hour waiting tables is not really good. I was making around $12 an hour waiting tables in Dayton Ohio back in 2001, and I wasn't tipped. If I had gone to a place with tips I would have made much more.
Someone taught me a phrase a couple years ago, 'Amholes'. I gave him a blank look because I didn't know what he was talking about.
Apparently in the SLU neighborhood, Amazon employees have gotten a reputation for taking up the whole damned sidewalk when they go to lunch. And I don't mean fifteen people taking up the sidewalk, not much you can do about that. I mean three or four.
Yeah they move in packs. We call them badgers (all have their Amazon badges out, let's you use that badger, badger, badger song from the 2000s flash video craze) amongst my group of friends. Don't blame them though, it's their small team and they work so closely and do everything together from what I understand. A lot are transplants and it's their first batch of work friends in town fresh out of college. Doesn't bother me, but then again I rarely go to SLU for lunch. I'd rather ride up to LQA, Fremont, eat at the market, or stay in Belltown. So many crowd free lunch options.
I worked a mercifully short contract there, and the group I worked with was so shell shocked by how painful the Dev environment was that it's a wonder none of us got hit by a car crossing the street. We were distracted and tense all the time.
When I see them I wonder if they're having a day like mine were. And I stop my friends from working anywhere but AWS.
warehousing and many other jobs at that pay level are notoriously high turnover and not having to manage the people directly can be a good choice for many organizations.
the idea it is merely to escape benefits is not really valid. now the ACA was modified so that self insured and group insured companies must offer benefits after ninety days. the turnover prior to that can be very high so escaping that rule isn't the primary reason to contract out, its to reduce the HR costs associated with hiring.
And Google is about to jump to number two on the downtown sq ft list when it moves into it's new 600000 sqft south lake union offices in a couple of years.
I think you misinterpret frugal to mean "cheap". Also I love the idea of the urban campus both from a convenience and a social consciousness perspective.
I ride a bus across the city that goes almost door to door from my apartment to my office. It's fantastic. I used to do the commute across the area by car and it was awful, a couple hours a day sitting in my car wasting time.
Anecdote, but I had a friend who recently finished working at Amazon in a analysis position and he took quarterly trips with colleagues from Seattle to meet in NYC for a few hours, stayed for almost a week, at out at fine restaurants, all on the company dime.
It's not! Instead it's part of principle #6, "hire the best." Hire the best, frugally.
Their leadership principles are deliberately contradictory. This is ostensibly a strength: you are tasked with satisfying all of them at once. But I fear in practice it's license to justify any management behavior.
Obviously I don't foresee Amazon tanking any time soon, but if/when they do I can't imagine how it'd do anything other than ruin Seattle, just like the exodus of automobile manufacturers started the decline of Detroit in the '50s.
Seattle already went through this once, back in the early '70s during a crash in the airline market. There was even a rumored billboard put up that said some thing like "when the last person leaves, will someone turn out the lights". This was folklore to me as a child, but I just Googled to see if there was some truth. Yeup, true. [1]
When I worked at Microsoft I couldn't help but think that the glitzy construction on the eastside, especially Bellevue, would also end up abandoned as Microsoft fades.
Detroit was the primary example I would think of, but also the 1963 promotional video of Rochester, NY (home of Kodak and Xerox, also where I went to school) reminded me a lot of Bellevue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v5x6qIy4Xc
I was pondering all this before Amazon rose to its current stature, and as a former SLU resident in that time period I can say they changed the town. So maybe that's actually an argument that the region is a bit more diversified now.
I think that's a bit of a reach. That malaise may have contributed to certain aspects of the conglomeration of groups/sounds that came to be called grunge, but let's not forget the vigorous marketing efforts around it at the time. Economically-speaking, the decline of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest may have as had as much or more to do with music-impacting unhappiness.
You're right; the shift away from old-growth timber logging, along with fisheries decline/regulation, all had significant impact as well. We were talking about major employers causing city-wide economic trouble, though. Not sure Weyerhaeuser was as significant an employer in Seattle.
Weyerhauser's HQ was a large property along I-5 between Auburn and Fife. Not really a Seattle phenomenon, especially the logging which happened in the peripheral counties. So i'll place a vote for the Boeing effect gestating the grunge era. It was poor, and it was grungy.
Interestingly, Weyerhauser has sold the old HQ and relocated to a downtown Seattle high rise.
It happened with RIM in Waterloo,Canada. Of course the scale is not the same, but RIM was the largest employer and was taking other any available office building in the city.
When RIM tanked it was not that bad, numerous small startup were started by ex-employees that took over the office space. It's like a tree in a forest, it falls and rots giving nutrients and sun light to the younger trees that otherwise wouldn't be able to grow.
The low property values are a part of the problem.
When infrastructure is built to transport, feed, house, and otherwise take care of people in a booming industry, and then that industry leaves, that infrastructure doesn't magically downsize itself or continue to work forever. It has holding costs, and it has maintenance costs. A lot of those local costs are paid for by property taxes. And when the condo goes from San Francisco prices to Detroit prices (or sits empty and abandoned), those property taxes drop off.
Those maintenance needs apply to the offices and factories of the industry, too. And to the restaurants those employees visit, the malls, dealerships, dealerships, grocery stores, gas stations, and everywhere else they shop at. That Post Amazon Condo you'd like to buy needs maintenance, too. These service industries need money to come in from somewhere.
A town can't just pass around the same dollar forever. And when Amazon, or the mining company, or the auto company, or the steel company or whatever industry is actually providing value and bringing in external dollars disappears, the place will slowly die. People will want to continue to live in the booming city they remember, enjoying the gorgeous scenery, even as unemployment skyrockets, savvy businesses leave town, crime rises, and infrastructure rots and rusts. They will call for state aid, and federal aid, but those are just band-aids on the problem that the city's economy is running backwards, just trying to keep up with all the maintenance debt.
Michigan is a beautiful place, too. I wouldn't call the weather mild, but it's an amazing place with all four seasons and we Michiganders like that. But the cheap parts of the state are not known for their scenery, they're known as desolate concrete wastelands.
Amazon's work in Seattle doesn't require huge factories and a chain of regional suppliers. If things go bad for Amazon other companies will utilize those people in Seattle.
> Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city
I'd be more interested in how "prime" is defined here and what the percentage looks like if you include what they're presumably defining as secondary office space.
Also considering the fact that Amazon constructed much (most?) of its office space. But "Amazon funds 25% increase in Seattle's prime office space" isn't as interesting a headline.
According to this, Seattle has 50.7 million square feet of Class A office space. Amazon's 8.1 million square feet is 16%. There are 53 million square feet of Class B office space.
In comparison, Apple occupies about 70 percent of Cupertino’s commercial real estate. Though Cupertino isn't a "major U.S. city" so Seattle Times' claim stills stands.
I live a few miles from both the old and new Apple HQ buildings. Apple doesn't really dominate the character of Cupertino. You'll see a lot of Apple employees eating at restaurants near the office, but aside from that, you can't really tell. When the new office opens up and causes a traffic nightmare, that will be the largest impact Apple has had on non-employees.
> Cupertino is like hide-and-go-seek except with Apple offices. Almost every office building is Apple.
While I agree, it's not immediately obvious these are Apple buildings. The buildings outside the main campus are dull 1980s style offices and the only hint they're Apple is the small emblem hidden on the side of the building. If you are driving down the street it can be difficult to tell.
For example, 19925 Stevens Creek Blvd is an Apple building but there's no way of knowing that unless you spot the small white apple emblem next to the driveway. Otherwise it looks just like a regular office building.
20330 Stevens Creek Blvd is even worse, there isn't even a logo anywhere just the letters 'APPLE' in tiny font on a nondescript sign. I had no idea this was Apple until someone showed me.
Actually, that's a pretty good way to tell who they belong to. Apple buildings have a signature "style"–blacked out windows, trees very close to the building, a small Apple logo on one of the doors somewhere, and umbrellas on the second floor terraces. If you learn the clues it's pretty easy to spot them.
Are you sure you didn't dig to find those examples? There are many buildings on SC with the regular Apple sign right on the street. To say nothing of the dozens of signs on Bubb, De Anza, Mariani, Valley Green, Bandley, etc., etc.
No reasonable person could drive around Cupertino for more than 10 minutes without noticing the large number of Apple buildings.
Google owns almost the entire North Bayshore area - that's the area north of 101. They also own smaller campuses or isolated buildings by Whisman/Middlefield, Shoreline/Terra Bella, and Mayfield/Central.
But Mountain View still has large commercial/industrial zones by San Antonio Center, on Castro Street itself, and in the 237/85 triangle by Whisman/Ellis/Dana. The Whisman/Ellis area is particularly large: this is the home of Symantic, Veritas, YCombinator, Whatsapp, Coursera, Mozilla, Samsung, and several other companies that aren't household names.
If I don't cross 101, I really don't notice Google except for the commute traffic, Waymo cars and the shuttle busses during the commute. Kind of surprising that Google makes up 50% of Mountain View business real estate.
Of course the Seattle area is home to Microsoft and Boeing. Both have a huge amount of square feet. A single Boeing building in Everett, north of Seattle, is 4.3 million square feet. About half of Amazon's total.
> A single Boeing building in Everett, north of Seattle, is 4.3 million square feet. About half of Amazon's total.
You're talking about the Boeing Everett Factory[1], 399480 m2, 4.3 million square feet...
Of course it's big, it's a production line for Boeings 747-787, it's the largest building in the world by volume, you can see[2] that it can roughly fit 4 planes per line, with 6 lines, that's 24 planes
But... what does this have to do with office spaces in Seattle?
Aside: If you're ever in the area, and have a spare day, visit that building! I went for a tour there years ago and it blew my mind. There's something unique about standing on a gantry looking down at an unpainted 747 being assembled...
Nobody in Seattle thinks of Redmond or Everett as part of the city. This is a bit like going on an article about Manhattan office space and talking about random places in Newark.
From my house on the Eastside of Seattle, I would budget 10 minutes to get downtown.
Pick anywhere on what most consider to be the "Eastside", and I'll bet you can't get to the eastern shores of Lake Washington in ten minutes, let alone downtown Seattle. I live in Redmond, I budget a minimum of 30 minutes to get anywhere within the city limits of Seattle. That's on a good day, with no traffic.
--
Multi-year veteran of the Redmond->Seattle commute
The chart is a little deceiving considering Redmond (Microsoft) and Everett (Boeing) are within the metro area of Seattle and just a few minutes drive. It would be like publishing a stat about Manhattan but skipping companies in Brooklyn and Queens.
You forgot to mention Bellevue which is home to Microsoft, Expedia, Tableau, Concur, T-Mobile, Pokemon, Valve and others. All of those companies are more closely related to Amazon than Boeing.
The chart is also deceiving because they label the next 40 companies as "everyone else" which is simply false.
Also I don't see the definition of "prime office space". As far as I can tell the definition is "convenient for the purpose of this story".
Tableau is entirely in Fremont is it not? And also Expedia is moving to Interbay, which should make the area along 15th to Ballard... interesting.
Long winded aside: Provided we can get some more high-capacity, high-frequency, separated-infrastructure transit going, I'm all for more concentration in Seattle proper. Amazon catches flak for their South Lake Union campus, but as a person with a background in urban planning, they did the responsible thing. A suburban office park would have been the irresponsible thing.
In the ~decade that I've been here, Seattle is already vastly changed from what it was. In general, I think that's fantastic, we just need to do better at making sure that our rising tides raise all boats—in other words, we need to do better at housing affordability for everyone note working in tech. In the Bay Area, we have a cautionary tale. We can do this.
I'm almost certain Tableau started in Bellevue, I just didn't know they moved. When I was working on the eastside they had a big office downtown by the Microsoft towers.
Expedia is moving to the old Amgen campus but currently they are still in Bellevue.
I agree with your aside completely. What do you think of the light rail addition on I-90?
Connecting downtown Seattle and downtown Bellevue is a grand idea—a far better idea than connecting the airport to downtown. Both are major centers of employment.
My understanding is that there are some technical / engineering challenges to running light rail across via I-90, but smarter people than I seem to think that they are surmountable.
In principle, I think that light rail is just another transit technology, and an expensive one at that. BRT could easily be done in lieu of light rail. In practice, however, Seattle seems to do a terrible job at BRT. Rapid Ride got watered down to the point where I simply call it "bus red transit." So, maybe we can't actually build good quality BRT, and we need the huge capital expenditure of light rail to do it right.
Microsoft has offices in Bellevue as well. If Tableau is in Fremont they moved and I missed it. They're still comparable to Amazon and in the Seattle metro area yet outside the "prime" locations.
I dunno about "a few minutes." Everett is at least an hour north of Seattle at most times of day. Redmond is also 30-45 minutes outside Seattle; it's very much not part of the city.
Redmond and the rest of the eastside are very much part of the Seattle area. Many people commute both ways. I agree that when you go as far North as Everett and as far south as Tacoma those are different areas.
That's not really true. Seattle doesn't exist in a vacuum, they are all part of the same metro area. So sure, Portland is not the same city but you can't say Bellevue is entirely separate.
Of course it's true. The city of Seattle is a thing, and it doesn't include the eastside. And sure, they're part of the metro area, but so is Tacoma. Eastsiders are always trying to pretend they live in Seattle.
Eastsiders are always trying to pretend they live in Seattle.
Don't flatter yourself, Eastsiders "pretend" out of convenience to those that don't obsess about Washington geography. I say "Seattle" because I don't expect someone from Iowa to have any clue where Redmond is. Just like I'd tell people "Charlotte, NC" when I really lived in Gastonia; nobody knows where the hell Gastonia, NC is, and being 20 miles away, "Charlotte" is close enough. I otherwise am quite content to have nothing to do with the city of Seattle proper, nor pretend that I am a resident.
Sure, and that makes total sense when you're talking to someone who doesn't know the area. But disagreeing with me when I say that Bellevue isn't part of the City of Seattle is just weird.
You're twisting my words. Of course Bellevue is not part of the City of Seattle but they are very much codependent. The obsession over the city line is pointless here. This is important in a conversation about office space. The obsessive focus on a subset of the City of Seattle's office space serves to advance a specific narrative and ignores the reality of the situation.
I think the place we're missing each other here is that people who literally live in Seattle care about Seattle as a separate entity from the metropolitan area.
Yes, that is where we are missing each other because fixating on some subset of the office space in the area ignores the reality both for the metro area and Seattle proper. The metro area is what matters economically and office space should be evaluated in that context. We can discuss the impact to the city itself of its share of office space in the metro area but focusing on this little piece of the puzzle is a distraction.
Well... a Seattle city newspaper wrote an article about the city of Seattle. It's a valid lens to examine Amazon's impact to Seattle. Your insistence on being included in a conversation about a city you don't live in is kinda weird.
Also note that I agreed with your post above, and just pointed out that Bellevue is "not part of the city." It literally is not. That's all I said.
How do you know where I live? Not that it matters but I moved to Seattle in 2011 and I have lived and worked in both Bellevue and Seattle.
ST is fixating on one aspect of Amazon's impact to the city of Seattle to advance their desired narrative. They use a hyperbolic headline to perpetuate a negative image of Amazon then correlate office space with economic contribution. Nothing in the article convinces me that Amazon has turned Seattle into a "company town'.
You response to my post was literally (emphasis mine):
> I agree. But they're not at all part of the city.
My point is that Belleuve and the rest of the eastside is much more closely related to Seattle than a place like Everett or Tacoma and so a conversation about office space should acknowledge that. People and companies are mobile between the eastside and Seattle much more than they are to the north and south. This is relevant in a conversation about office space, even if you are evaluating it from a position of what's best for Seattle itself.
But disagreeing with me when I say that Bellevue isn't part of the City of Seattle is just weird.
Fair enough, and assuming that you've met such folks, that is weird...and kind of stupid. Me, I'm content with a certain sense of smugness about living in Redmond and not Seattle. :-)
Boeing used to have a major factory in Seattle (Plant 2) but moved all those operations outside of the city. Boeing retains some operations at Boeing Field.
Fun fact its also the largest warehouse in the world from what I was told when I visited the factory
Its one of the coolest places I've ever been too
Also, Amazon owns about a dozen large office complexes in Seattle from what I understand and I got a backtour of the newest building last year which was cool
Yes, this article is very specific to the city of Seattle, when most of us would think of "The Seattle Area".. eg, I would lump in Mcdonalds headquarters into "Chicago" even though they are in a neighboring city..
I know Amazon earned a very bad reputation recently with all the complaints about it's work conditions and employee morale. Does anyone here know if there has been improvement in that area? It seems like Amazon is recruiting very aggressively now days and I'm thinking of giving them a chat.
I worked there years ago, so here's a bit of trivia. The Cray Supercomputers you see in Seattle is an acquirer of Cray Research. The original Cray was bought by SGI in the late 90s and sold to a Seattle supercomputer startup named Tera in the 2000s with some help from the US government-- unhappy about how SGI ran Cray. The company still kept a surprising percentage of its early engineers, despite passing through several owners and changing HQ locations.
> A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer.
From the article:
> Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city
True company towns are known for an abusive power dynamic where employers, by controlling employees' income and expenses simultaneously, can force them into debt and make them unable to leave. It's a sort of societal anti-pattern, which our culture recognized and gave a name to. But Amazon in Seattle doesn't fit that antipattern, because it doesn't control its employees' housing or other expenses. I'd rather we didn't dilute the "company town" phrase to refer to cases where a company merely owns lots of office space.
Not sure if you've been to South Lake Union recently (I live nearby) but I think it does fit that description, at least a modern version of it. TONS of Amazon employees live and work in SLU and very close and spend a large amount of their time there. There's a huge internal system of restaurants, cafes, and stores and of course Amazon's own dogfooded grocery stuff.
I mean it's pretty far from a scrip system at a mining town but they're capturing as much of the lives as possible of the people who work there for the two years or so they stick around on average.
So yeah, while it isn't a 'company town' by the original definition it's a modern interpretation of it. Of course Google, Microsoft, FB and others have the same idea - it's a great way to squeeze every drop out of your employees.
> There's a huge internal system of restaurants, cafes, and stores
This made me laugh out loud. The only thing you get at Amazon for free is water and coffee and a $100 credit on Amazon purchases where the seller is Amazon.
There are a handful of coffee shops that are in the buildings that serve some food but that space is leased by those companies. The food and drinks are absolutely not free.
Most Amazon employees go outside to the foodtrucks and buy from there.
I will say that just like most people living in cities a lot of things are purchased through Amazon and so in that sense it is a bit like a company store.
Outside of that, it's just laughably absurd. The employees would be much happier if they got those perks.
> There are a handful of coffee shops that are in the buildings that serve some food but that space is leased by those companies. The food and drinks are absolutely not free.
I think they meant internal to South Lake Union.
> The employees would be much happier if they got those perks.
If they got those perks but had to live in a suburban sprawl like SV? I think it's more of a tradeoff that some people are glad to make.
Who owns the land that the restaurants in SLU lease? Serious question. It's all been built up so quickly and is all so new -- it looks like it could be Amazon-owned, or that could just be a natural consequence of being built around the same time.
A lot of SLU land is owned by Vulcan (aka Paul Allen). I don't know about Amazon's stuff specifically. I would guess a lot of their real estate is leased.
Half and half - Vulcan owns about thirty acres in and around SLU after Amazon bought a bunch of it from Vulcan. They're planning on buying the other thirty as well over the next ten to twenty years apparently.
I think you misunderstood, the GP didn't imply they were free. In fact, that's kind of the point of the "company town" comparison -- force your employees to spend money in your stores.
Food on site is intended to keep your employees on site. There's no other point.
Every other employer provides meal stipends, which employees can use as reimbursement for meals (perk). They also get wider choice and variety. But then they're not in the office.
If you can't afford to build a kitchen, you provide a stipend and a website to order delivery from a rotating array of local restaurants.
Keep food on site, they stay on site, where they can continue to peer-bond, talk about work, and get back to work.
There are company cafeterias and private restaurants and food trucks. Amazon does not force employees to buy food at Amazon cafes. The campus is just in a city where normal city things exist.
Is that what this argument is about? Are there people so deep inside the tech bubble that they think free onsite meals are a standard feature of employment?
>"I mean it's pretty far from a scrip system at a mining town but they're capturing as much of the lives as possible of the people who work there for the two years or so they stick around on average."
Interesting, is two years a real average for an Amazon relocation hire in Seattle?
The relocation benefits have to be paid back (prorated) until two years, so it sounds plausible enough. For what it's worth (not much without numbers on growth and turnover), I've been with them for about 2.5 years and am around the 60th percentile for tenure among Seattle-based employees.
Because they also give you a sign bonus in two parts, a lump sum for the first year, and the second year it is divided between the 12 paychecks. After two years, both the bonus and relocation have vested.
Yes. I have a friend at Amazon who just finished his fifth year and he confirmed he's already an in the upper quartile of longevity. He estimated a median 'lifespan' of 18 months for Seattle-based devs; it was admittedly a back-of-the-envelope calculation but their turnover is definitely sky-high.
I don't know the answer to your question but two years is the length you have to stay so that you don't have to pay back the relocation bonus. It would not surprise me that many people leave at 2 years.
The contracts Amazon offered (at least as of two years ago) were heavy on the starting bonus and grant of stock that you gave up if you quit before two years.
It was apparent from the job offer terms that they didn't expect people to stick around for much longer than that. Most of the future compensation was the promise of more stock grants. No guarantees, and your long term financial future was betting on investors continue to write Bezos a blank check.
To me, Amazon looked like working for a big company with many of the drawbacks of working for a startup. I didn't come away with the impression that you could make a career there.
That's working well for them I guess, but they're well known for their ridiculous employee turnover rate.
That still doesn't sound much like a company town, if all they're doing is setting up convenient stores and services that their employees choose to patronize (or not), rather than making it nearly impossible for their employees to do anything else.
Despite that bogus use of the term, I found the article surprisingly good. I'm really coming to dislike headline writers (who are usually not the authors of the article).
Comparing modern Seattle to the insane totalitarian, 100% owned by Steel and Coal refineries company towns of the 19th century is sensationalism at it's prime. These towns controlled everything about your life and were willing to use night sticks and rifles to prevent unionization.
Amazon owning 19% of "prime-office space" is even remotely comparable.
Also their well-known frugality principle, while not really meaning a lot when you consider salaries, helps to stem the "entitled" image that say a company like Google gets more of.