The (mostly) true story of Amazon’s HQ2
Hey, Grandpa, can you tell me the story of Amazon again?
Sure, Billy. When I was a little boy, I lived in a place called Pittsburgh.
That’s a funny name, Grandpa!
Yeah, that’s what a marketing team decided when I was a teenager. They renamed my hometown ThreeRivers! — with an exclamation point — not long after the UPMC-Highmark merger. That was first on its list of demands. But you want to know about Amazon.
Well, believe it or not, Billy, Amazon was still just a little company in 2017, only the second-biggest employer in America. It would be years before it annexed Australia. But it was getting too big for its hometown of Seattle so it launched a nationwide contest for HQ2.
What’s that?
That’s what Amazon was calling its second headquarters. I’m not sure why. Sounded cooler, I suppose. Anyway, Amazon asked all the cities in America to compete against each other for its big prize. Pittsburgh made it to the top 20!
Nice! What was the prize, Grandpa?
The winner got to throw a lot of money at Amazon.
Wait … what?
Well, see, the cities wanted all the jobs that Amazon promised: 50,000 of them.
Wow. Could that many new people fit in a little city?
Well, nobody got to find out — but I’m coming to that. At the start, the contending cities went all kinds of nuts. Pittsburgh and Allegheny County got together with the governor of Pennsylvania and offered Amazon something close to $10 billion in incentives.
That sounds like a lot of money even now. But what’s an incentive?
That’s where you try to figure out what a business wants and you give it that. Then you give a little more. Even spread out over 25 years, it was a mind-boggling number, and Pittsburgh politicians wouldn’t even say how much they were offering until the contest was over. That’s when we found out no city on the continent then called North America — you know it as NA-Amazon — offered more.
Is that allowed, Grandpa? Government keeping incentives a secret from the people?
The state Office of Open Records didn’t think so. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won a ruling on that during the bid process. But I don’t have time to explain what a newspaper was. We’re nearing the exciting conclusion.
Oh boy. Do tell, Gramps.
Well, here’s the funny part. When Amazon finally announced who won HQ2, it was more like HQ over 2. Amazon said it would set up half its operation in northern Virginia and half in New York City. It seems little Pittsburgh never really had a shot; Amazon had its eye on much bigger metro areas all the while.
Then a couple of months passed. Some folks in New York turned out to be not nearly pliable enough. They complained about corporate welfare and Amazon execs were peeved. It seems billionaire corporate moguls have feelings, too. Amazon announced it needed “positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long term.” Somehow, New York has managed to survive all the years since without them.
But we in Pittsburgh already had been kicked to the curb. Amazon, which one day said it needed a place to put 25,000 jobs had decided the next day it didn’t. Our politicians, up off their knees by then, stood ready to resume that position, but Amazon started scattering its jobs around the country. That seemed like it should have been its plan in the first place. Pretty soon Amazonians were working everywhere.
And that, Billy, is the reason “one nation under Amazon’’ is now part of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Is that a true story, Grandpa?
It mostly is. Truth is, though, I forget some of what happened around the time Amazon announced its new version of “Escape From New York.” A man named Antonio Brown was leaving the Steelers and so Pittsburghers had a lot more important things to discuss.