Amazon’s beauty pageant a sociological experiment
Bezos is seeking a city that can have its growth path altered by company’s new HQ
Gifts are easy. They’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful. And if you do, it will probably be to the detriment of your choices. —Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos
The beauty contest launched by Jeff Bezos is a corporate experiment unmatched in modern times. The challenge of choice he has set for himself — or the gift he will bestow — is to select a site for a second Amazon headquarters, a new HQ, or HQ2 as Bezos calls it. Cities across the continent are going mad, garishly sashaying about with their attributes on display, Toronto among them.
Amazon has set a response deadline of Oct. 19 for cities to make their prettiest pitch. Or silliest. Gary, Ind., placed an advertisement in the New York Times this week in the form of a letter from “Gary” to Mr. Jeff Bezos. “How are you?” the letter begins. “My name is Gary and I am a legacy city in the Northwest corner of Indiana. I was born in 1906 and my parents were Elbert Gary and U.S. Steel.”
Yet there’s something very right about the letter/ad from a city fallen on hard times, and it is this thought: “We can strike a mutually beneficial deal that changes the course of my future as well as the families who live here.”
As big cities rich in STEM grads and mass transit and housing availability itemize how they meet the requirements for an Amazon campus that will grow to 50,000 full-time employees, one wonders what differentiating characteristics could tip the balance.
Gary’s letter more modestly reminds Bezos that, in making his choice, he’s in a position to pull off a transformation of place, an experiment as sociological as it is corporate.
In an analysis piece posted to the Medium website, Lyman Stone crunches a whole lot of data leading to the conclusion that “every city is bad for Amazon and nobody can fulfil their (request for proposal).”
Stone mapped metro areas with Amazon’s wish list as his guide. Seeking those cities with a large STEM pipeline gener- ates a list that includes Minneapolis, Raleigh, N.C., and Chicago. Metros with potentially sufficient housing supply to host Amazon draw the spotlight to Rochester, N.Y., Charlotte, N.C., St. Louis.
I’m not being comprehensive here, but you get the idea.
“On the housing supply front, there are cities that have produced excess housing units, and then there are cities that are priced competitively, and there is no overlap between them,” Stone writes.
For a company driven by data points and metrics, it’s unlikely that any of this comes as news to Amazon. So what’s all this about, then? Stone suggests that what Bezos really seeks is a city that can have its growth path altered in a significant way, decisively, by Amazon.
Let’s put the spotlight more brightly on Bezos for a moment. All the energetic rah-rah city boosterism talk tends to overlook Bezos’s own corporate history, which is far from unblemished. An investigation in 2011 into Amazon’s Breinigsville, Penn., warehouse reported on conditions so overheated that paramedics were kept at the ready to treat dehydrated workers.
“Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals,” the Morning Call reported. “And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.”
An emergency room doctor notified federal health and safety regulators of the unsafe working environment at the warehouse. One employee compared the conditions to “working in a convection oven while blow-drying your hair.”
After the story ran, the company made a substantial investment in warehouse cooling.
Other stories have documented the impact of Bezos’s leadership principles. Two years ago, the New York Times reported on what it called a bruising and punishing workplace where fractiousness is encouraged.
The Times cited cases where workers with legitimate health issues — surgery, breast cancer, the birth of a stillborn child — were put on performance improvement plans. “Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a littleknown experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.”
Last December, reporter Mary O’Connor went undercover for the Sunday Times, taking a job as a “picker” at Amazon’s warehouse in Scotland. She paid £10 a day for the bus that took her to the job, a bus that was arranged by the recruitment agency, earned £7 and change an hour, was not paid for her lunch break and was targeted for the four errors she made across 40 hours of “hunting and fetching.” Only one error per 40 hours is allowed before the worker’s performance becomes a disciplinary matter.
The Sunday Times pronounced Amazonia “a soulless world of backbreaking toil, petty rules, low pay and Orwellian surveillance.”
Nor did it help Amazon’s image that some workers at the distribution centre took to pitching tents nearby to avoid the transportation costs.
Bezos is one of the richest men in the world. And the company he runs reported net income of $2.4 billion (U.S.) on revenues of $136 billion last year. But he’s not known for his philanthropy. Two months ago, he pondered, via Twitter, what he should do with his dough.
So maybe he’s decided he wants to be seen as a good guy, not just a parsimonious, obsessively focused entrepreneur with operations that sound as though they have been sprung from Modern Times.
If that’s the case, Toronto is not his best bet.
If that is the case, Bezos would be smart to consider a city poised for, and deserving of, transformation. Say, Detroit. Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, is the guy behind that city’s bid.
In a statement released to the media, Gilbert said his team is working with the city of Windsor on a transnational submission. “Amazon will be able to draw employees from two countries rich in technology talent with diverse backgrounds while cementing it as the first major company in the world whose headquarters would literally share an international border.”
The hurdles are huge. To note just one, Amazon’s site requirements deem access to mass transit, never a priority in the birthplace of the car, a “core preference.” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever ridden the People Mover.)
And while Detroit has gained considerable positive press for enjoying a renaissance, that so-called resurgence is still in its unproved infancy.
All the more reason for Bezos to place a bet. This is his chance to remake a city.
His potential contributions in education, skills training and internet connectivity are immeasurable. The potential, as corny as it may sound in his circles, to do good. That Ontario could play a part in this is a bonus, and a cause that the Wynne government should champion. jenwells@thestar.ca
Maybe Bezos decided he wants to be seen as a good guy, not just a parsimonious, obsessively focused entrepreneur