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Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, the section of the city Amazon has "swallowed" was grass and weed filled parking lots 5 years ago as well as broken down buildings. While the construction has been a drag for drivers in that area, the city looks and feels so much better, IMO, due to their investments.

Now, has Amazon invested enough in infrastructure to help the swelling population they are partly to blame for increasing (not to mention lack of houses, housing prices, student class sizes, etc.)? No, not really - but that's the price of being one of the fastest growing cities with the lowest unemployment in the country. But in terms of the city buildings and neighborhood - so much better.

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This, many times over. Yes, Seattle's South Lake Union now looks a lot like downtown San Jose. It's a completely different world from 10 years ago, though, and so much better.

We missed out on a chance to have a giant urban park ("Seattle Commons": http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&...), but credit to Paul Allen for executing an unbelievable plan B.

[Bloomberg's article focuses more on Amazon's new HQ in downtown Seattle, but Amazon's impact today is mostly in South Lake Union. Background: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amazon-will...]

(Source: Born in Seattle and have lived within ~0.5 miles for 10+ years)

Wasn't a biotech hub plan B originally? That never panned out.

For reference I've worked in SLU for the better part of a decade, first at Rosetta Biosoftware (ISB is in that building now) and at AWS for the last 8 years.

There is quite a bit of biotech in the area, isn't there? UW Medicine and Novonordisk, as well as Fred Hutch etc.

There were plans for a lot more commercial biotech back in the day. Some of it has rebounded, but Seattle never really became a competitor to Cambridge (MA), San Diego, or the Bay Area. The non-profit side is pretty good.

I dunno, a giant green park within the city like SF's golden gate park or NYC's central park sounds really incredible.

It would have been, but voters rejected that idea. As my comment noted, by the time Amazon came along, a park wasn't one of the options.

Didn't Amazon start off in that weird decrepit hospital near Beacon Hill? I mean, SODO could very well have been Seattle's tech hub in an alternate timeline. Though if I get your gist, the point is that the decision was made before any big tech revival.

I remember SLU in the 90's, it was shady and dying. But when I think about SLU today, and how close it is geographically to the heart of the city, it seems like such a lost opportunity that it's now just a sprawling office towers instead of something more vibrant. After 7pm, the whole area from Denny to Capitol Hill just shuts down.

You don't like Discovery Park, Washington Park, Volunteer Park, Golden Gardens, Carkeek Park, or Lincoln Park?

They're all lovely parks, but none are within walking distance of downtown.

We may have different definitions of walking distance from downtown because I think that both Volunteer and Washington Park fall in that range, although I understand that they are farther than a hypothetical South Lake Union park. On the other hand, I would note that neither Golden Gate Park nor Central Park are near their respective downtowns.

I don't really disagree, but it's a 50 minute (uphill) walk from Pike Place to Volunteer Park, whereas it's 15 minutes to the edge of SLU. I don't really mind walking an hour, but many people do.

Golden Gate is a little out of the way, Central Park is super accessible by subway.

That's fair. Alternatively, it's a 35-minute bus ride.

Carkeek is nearly 100 blocks from downtown...

Sorry for my ignorance, but what's Paul Allen's "plan B"?

To prove that the Seattle Commons park could actually be built, Paul Allen acquired, or acquired rights to, a ton of land in South Lake Union. When voters rejected the property tax levy, he sat on it (as http://www.vulcanrealestate.com/). Between 2005-2012, he built what became Amazon's headquarters (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon-to-make-giant-mo...) and a lot of Amazon's growth.

Paul Allen was pushing for the Seattle Commons concept. When it didn't pass, he wound up owning a bunch of land that had no likely tenants. What South Lake Union has become is his "Plan B" because it's his property development company (Vulcan) that has done the lion's share of the building.

That's how I feel about Amazon, too. It cracks me up some of the things the author laments losing. No broken bottles? No cigarette trash? I like having at least one area of the city somewhat clean.

You hear this sort of thing about the "Disney-fication" of Times Square in NYC all the time. Not that I'm a fan of Times Square for a variety of reasons but anyone who looks nostalgically back to the 42nd Street on 1985 has some seriously rose-colored glasses.

It's the dreaded gentrification. If your neighborhood isn't kept in its run down and decrepit state the land values might go up and push out people who can no longer afford to pay rent.

I don't think there's a need to be sardonic; the full paragraph that I believe you're referencing goes on to talk about other common sights and elements of various Seattle districts; the complaint that some Seattlelites are putting forward isn't "we want a decrepit city" it's they want their decrepit city.

The complaint about the changes Amazon and other companies are making is not about keeping the city in a state of disarray and filthiness, it's about control over the tone and feel of the city, preferring that a single corporate entity not be able to set or dictate the tone/feel to accommodate their interests. Even if there is a net positive as a result, the local residents have no choice in the matter - as was written in the article, those parts of the city are no longer Seattle in some people's minds, it's Amazon's territory.

I'm not condemning or condoning this position - I did live in the Seattle area for about 5 years, and while I loved it, didn't really have the same historical attachment most Seattle folk have, and they love their city, what it was, is, and what it can be.

It's not too difficult to empathize with the position either; suppose, in a rather silly example, that a wealthy business whose owners had a love for early 1900's german expressionism moved to your city (which you feel a connection to); over the course of a few years, a large part of your city begins to take the form of stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or from Metropolis. The owners clean up the area very well and bring in new trendy restaurants that meet their aesthetic vision. Even if you agree that the area has been changed for the better in terms of infrastructure and economics, are you really satisfied with having expressionism forced on you?

Again, this isn't to say that feelings should override progress with civil infrastructure improvement, but there's a bit more to the gentrification effect, specifically from the tech world, than just a bunch of grumpy people angry about losing their run down and decrepit land. People have seen what happened with San Francisco and they're scared, and rightfully so; while the standard of living in Seattle is decent, the average wages are no match for SV style tech money.

As someone who is a Seattle Native, I don't see many employed adults complaining about it nearly as much as I see early 20 somethings complaining about it. The same people who don't remember much of older Seattle. Yes, we had "grunge" but really, we are not missing much with these changes. I do dislike how expensive housing as gotten, but its not that.

Plus, Amazon is not the only player here. Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, and Disney are all in the area as well. Google is also building a new office in the SLU area as well.

A true Seattle native is like a unicorn. Practically everyone around here is from somewhere else originally. This remains true even in the suburbs.

The exodus in the 70s really did a number on the area.

The only thing that neighborhood lost of any value was the Jones Soda bottling plant.

Yeah I don't get the complaints and honestly don't hear them much at least from my friends (I don't work for Amazon). I've lived here my whole life, seen the city change a lot. I used to think I'd probably move away some day. I've been to probably 40 countries now and the more I see of the world the more I see Seattle as ideal and heading (mostly) in the right direction.

I think people forget that Seattle was one of the first big cities to successfully revitalize their downtown. It started at Westlake Center and took twenty years to make it a mile north to South Lake Union.

To be fair, the article was complaining about Amazon advancing towards the real downtown, not the Mercer St wasteland Amazon's development fixed.

OTOH they're talking about having space for 50k employees at SLU so I'm not sure why the author thinks Amazon is advancing downtonw...

They have 4 city blocks on Westlake Avenue, around 6th and 7th Ave. That's right on the edge of what people would call Downtown.

I've actually stopped shopping at Amazon. I'll pay and extra $10 for high ticket items to avoid that retailer.

I'm sure many of the higher ups there don't have any ill-will, but they have unintentionally (or maybe intentionally; I dunno) become America's new Wal-Mart. That's a bad thing.

Consumerist culture erodes long term sustainability. Laptop/cellphone replacement cycles need to be 10 years, not 2. Old electronics need to be recycled--like actually recycled and not shipped to Africa where teenagers rip out and smelter what components they can.

I'm not saying Amazon is intentionally causing more consumerism, but it is a result of their type of industry. And the effects bleed out in a way you can see in its home city of Seattle.

Have you considered that maybe the prices of some products are so low because of planned obsolescence? If you want quality, buy Miele. You have a life time guarantee. And you won't have to use it. People who can't afford the quality can buy Samsung. Or do you think people who don't have $10k for a fridge shouldn't have one?

I think Miele has planned obsolescence now too, at least on most of its washing machines. It also seems unlikely the prices are low because of planned obsolescence - there's only so much you can cut from something before it starts failing within the warranty period. Most of the cost savings seem to be from newer, more automated and efficient mass production techniques. Planned obsolescence is a separate and intentional design decision.

> It also seems unlikely the prices are low because of planned obsolescence

As someone who does pricing strategy for a living, no it does not seem unlikely.

You're buying the same stuff on Amazon as you would buy from Wal-Mart and that's your fault. You dropped your phone so you go on Amazon and buy a new phone, but you could buy a new screen, and a tiny screwdriver too.

I think you're right about the need for real recycling, and consumerism is a debate worth having, but I don't see how fragmenting the marketplace works towards a solution.

There are plenty of valid concerns and complaints about Amazon (I'll list some of mine below), but I don't see why you're blaming them for electronics recycling and lifetimes, or "Walmartification". Amazon has done a pretty good job of being an all-in-one place to shop online and having very low prices overall.

For cellphone replacement cycles, I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that Amazon has anything to do with this. AFAIK, most Americans still "buy" cellphones at cellphone stores run by the big 4. You can blame them for the 2-year subsidization scheme. And phones are lasting longer now. I have a 3-year-old Galaxy S4 that works great. For a while, there were huge changes in the hardware, but it's plateauing now.

For laptop replacement cycles, again I have no idea why you'd blame Amazon in particular, but here especially, people simply are not replacing laptops in 2 years like they did 10+ years ago. It's a real "problem" for the PC industry in fact, because people are keeping their PCs around a lot longer than they used to. I've got a few laptops ranging from probably 4-6 years old, and lots of people have desktops quite a bit older than that. New computers just aren't any faster than old ones, they only consume a little less power.

Consumerism is something you can only really blame society in general for. And these days, with this crummy economy, I think it's probably less than it used to be: with rents so high nationwide, and salaries stagnant, and underemployment rampant, people aren't spending as much on trinkets and junk as they used to. Some things still are popular to spend on, like phones (but not computers), but overall I would imagine there's less "consumerism" right now than there was back in 1999 because we are not in a booming economy. When people have extra money to spend, they spend more; when things are tight, they don't.

As for valid (IMO) complaints about Amazon, here's my list:

1) they jerk their prices around a LOT. I have stuff in my "save for later" cart that keeps jumping up and down by huge factors (one pen in particular keeps jumping between $5-something and $9.99). Many things seem to start out at a low price, and then when I put them in my cart but don't buy them right away, they just keep going up and up and up. It really feels like a ploy to extract more money.

2) their prices are frequently not that low anymore. I always try to shop around for stuff, and will frequently (but not always) find better deals at smaller sellers.

3) a lot of stuff they sell is junk shipped from China, and it's not immediately obvious that it's being shipped from out of the country.

For a lot of small knick-knacks that I need (for instance, I needed a new windshield washer nozzle recently), I'm finding that Ebay is actually the best place to go, strangely enough. Independent online stores (even ones owned by companies selling on Ebay) usually cost about the same, maybe slightly less, but then have high shipping charges which isn't helpful if you're only buying one thing, and it's really easy to punch in a part number and find something on Ebay. You can find it on Amazon too, but it usually seems to be a much worse deal, though I'm not sure why. I wonder if Ebay has lower fees for large-volume sellers than Amazon. The main thing Amazon is really, really good for is the reviews. And even these are suspect these days because for certain classes of items, many of the reviews are shill reviews, or at least suspect, because someone was given the item at a reduced price in exchange for writing a review.

>>"Walmartification"

Amazon is inarguably the new Wal-Mart.

1) Putting local stores and shops out of business

2) Abusing their power as a distributor and treating their suppliers/partners like crap

3) Lower than average salaries for most employees

4) Treating employees terribly

Seriously, there are more similarities than differences.

2) They have never been the lowest prices - you could, and still can, almost always find better prices elsewhere. But for the majority of people, the convenience is worth the extra cost.

3) No other stores sell stuff from China? Or maybe you're not used to seeing the cheap import items displayed next to the regular items?

In response to 1)

The phenomenon you're viewing is usually the opposite of what you're suggesting. Amazon is trying to let you opportunistically buy things at a lower price by allowing prices to change frequently.

Part of the appeal of Amazon is being able to get something on your doorstep in two days at the click of a button -- if this isn't something that interests you then services like Ebay might be better -- but the sheer convenience of being able to not plan out bulk orders and having a near 100% reliability with no hassle is great.

When I was purchasing things on Ebay, shipping was frequently late, or entire items would be fraudulent, which I've heard has gotten better, but I'd prefer to offload that stress for a few dollars a year.

I've been buying stuff on Ebay since 1996, and I only once ran into a fraudulent seller, and that was in 1998; I managed to track down his home address and phone number, and called and talked to his parents, who promptly straightened it all out. (It was some stupid teenager "selling" stuff and never shipping it.)

What I do see these days is counterfeit stuff. It's really easy to avoid this stuff though: there's a checkbox on the left that lets you filter results to show only US sellers or North American sellers. Filter out the Chinese sellers and the counterfeit stuff goes away. I've never had a big problem with late shipping, but if you're the type who demands stuff ASAP I can see how you'd be unhappy. The big thing you can do on Ebay is be careful who you buy from and look at the feedbacks. Huge-volume sellers with good feedback are usually pretty safe, and ship quickly. Low-volume occasional sellers with 100% feedback are safe. Foreign sellers with spotty feedback are to be avoided unless it's something really cheap and you're willing to take a gamble on it being junk (if it doesn't show up at all, Ebay will refund your money). It's really not that different from Amazon in this regard, since so much stuff on Amazon is sold by "affiliates", a bunch of whom are Chinese sellers, or otherwise independent companies that ship themselves rather than outsourcing that to Amazon.

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