HQ2, DRONE DELIVERIES IN 5 YEARS, BOTH FALL SHORT

nontechnical, nonlegal term, but it plays well in the press to talk like this,” O’kelley said. “It was a great PR move in all kinds of ways.”

Qinghai Wang, a finance professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied corporate headquarters, agreed.

“Corporate headquarters, or at least the part that is central to decision-making, should be just in one place,” he said. “Boeing, another Seattle company that moved headquarters more than 10 years ago, only moved a few hundred people to Chicago. Amazon is a big company, and it has a very big headquarters already.”

At least one expert realized some time ago how the game would end.

“Don’t be surprised if later this year, Amazon announces that it’s going to have more than one HQ2,” the City Observatory, a think tank in Portland, Ore., said in an essay posted in January. One reason: “If a single winner is announced, and its competitors are dismissed, then Amazon’s negotiating position becomes much weaker,” the essay said. Having multiple winners, on the other hand, would allow the company to play one off the other.

Even as the news sank in Monday, some people rued the lost chance that Amazon would do something truly transformative — not just for the company, but for its new home.

“Big tech is at a pivotal moment, and Amazon is at the head of the class,” said Scott Phillips, an entrepreneur who submitted a proposal to build an enormous city for Amazon in rural Oklahoma. “It is time for them to aggressively think not just about their bottom line but about ways they can do right by the world.”

Washington and New York already have lots of tech talent, which of course explains why Amazon would move to those places. “Amazon could have pulled a new region of the country onto the ‘haves’ list and pioneered much of the world’s future in the process,” Phillips lamented.

In a way, the two-headquarters story was too good to be true even when Amazon proclaimed it bluntly and at length. “Amazon HQ2 will be Amazon’s second headquarters in North America,” the company said in its promotional material. “We expect to invest over $5 billion in construction and grow this second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs — it will be a full equal to our current campus in Seattle.”

Instead, while nothing official has been announced and things could shift at the last minute, it appears HQ2 will rank with the company’s proclamation that drones would deliver packages. When the CEO, Jeff Bezos, unveiled that initiative on “60 Minutes,” he said the drones would come in “four, five years.” That was almost exactly five years ago.

The drones have not taken flight, but many articles about them did. Amazon likewise gained enormous amounts of raw publicity from its search for a second headquarters.

It gained something else as well.

“It’s tempting to roll your eyes at this soap opera, but Amazon will walk away from this stunt with a cache of incredibly valuable data,” said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-reliance, a frequent Amazon critic. “It’s learned all kinds of things from the bidding cities — like their future infrastructure plans — that even their citizens are not privy to.”

Here is what is next, she said: “Amazon will put this data to prodigious use in the coming years as it looks to expand its market power and sideline the competition.”

Amazon is always expanding its market power. Consider a recent routine news release: “Amazon Announces 14th Inland Empire Fulfillment Center in Beaumont,” it said. Fulfillment center is a fancy term for warehouse. The Inland Empire is a vast area east of Los Angeles. To build 14 warehouses there in six years is a feat. Amazon said it was now the largest employer in the region.

Amazon likes to release news on its own schedule. But the headquarters story leaked to outlets including The Washington Post — owned by Bezos — and The Wall Street Journal. It was a rare stumble for a company that excels at controlling the narrative.

The real narrative, now and always with Amazon, is its ambition — sometimes veiled, sometimes overt, but never absent. The satirical site The Onion took the present to its logical extreme last month:

“After a search for a new location lasting more than a year, a massive dome was seen descending from the sky and enclosing the whole nation Friday as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced to a horrified American populace that it was now living inside his company’s second headquarters.”