Amazon has as much office space in Seattle as the next 40 biggest employers
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
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.
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.
Source: oh god I interviewed there.
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 contending that Amazon has approximately the same reputation in Seattle that Google has in the Bay Area.
That was mostly before on-call employment for retail employees and the collapse of malls. It was a better time for most folks economically.
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.
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)
If you own, you pat yourself on the back for making a wise financial decision.
Funny how that works :)
And yes, I'm just bitter because nobody bothered to thank me for moving TO California :)
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.
Seattle is still a car culture.
Also, people who don't live the suburban car life typically don't buy "weekly" groceries.
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)
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.
At least in Amsterdam where I biked around a bit, it seemed flat as a pancake.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/swoo/8148861498
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.
on a 500$/month grocery family budget you are looking at 100$ - 150$ more for convenience potentially. Its a lot of money for most.
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....
"Saint or GTFO" is a losing debate strategy with an aware counterparty.
Outdoor stuff was also not really forced or brought up other than offers to join or use equipment, which was very kind.
I've worked for 4 different companies in the Seattle area and it's been 50/50 indifference vs quiet disdain.
Like subcontracting all their warehouse staff so they can keep them off the books and not have to deal with their benefits.
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.
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.
After, I couldn't help but notice.
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.
I guess working remotely for 3 days per week does not sit well with Bezo's autocratic management style that mandates extreme micromanagement.
And frugality just drives their best employees to Google, which has a significant presence in the area.
Interestingly, Weyerhauser has sold the old HQ and relocated to a downtown Seattle high rise.
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.
It's a hard problem.
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.
[1] http://old.seattletimes.com/special/centennial/november/ligh...
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.
ducks.. found that one hard to resist
Edit: downvotes, really. what lovely, entertaining people you all must be.
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.
https://goo.gl/maps/RsVxwkZLpir
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.
I'd probably estimate it at maybe 50%.
Go down a residential side street? Oh wow there's a little Apple office between those two houses.
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.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3230321,-122.0215347,3a,60y,...
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.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3228536,-122.0285457,3a,75y,...
If you are just driving down Stevens Creek there is a good chance you won't realize how expansive Apple is. They are not flashy buildings.
No reasonable person could drive around Cupertino for more than 10 minutes without noticing the large number of Apple buildings.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. :-)
I don't consider myself particularly stupid or weird but I do admit to bias on that topic.
See this is the great part about our little rivalry! Everyone gets to feel smug. :) (No sarcasm, I really think it's a pro.)
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.
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.
It takes an hour to drive across LA. From my house on the Eastside of Seattle, I would budget 10 minutes to get downtown. That's close enough for me.
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
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
Anyway, with Amazon growing uncontrollably these days, monopoly lawsuit is probably on the horizon somewhere soon.
Amazon was founded in the area due to the pool of technical talent and because of its proximity to one of the largest book distributors at the time.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's an absurd statement though. A company town exploits the workers by making profit from them. Amazon is not doing this. It's clickbait.
Interesting, is two years a real average for an Amazon relocation hire in Seattle?
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.
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.
Having eaten at Google's internal cafe, it is most definitely a perq, and is useful for attracting employee candidates.
"The accepted spelling for the abbreviation of perquisite is perk, usually rendered as the plural, perks."
If only.
Ha, what?
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?
Amazon owning 19% of "prime-office space" is even remotely comparable.