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Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says (wsj.com) 85

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Amazon plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, WSJ reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities. From the report: The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company's headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company's plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems. [...] The report, published Monday, did not specify the locations Amazon is exploring, but on Sunday, the newspaper had reported that the ecommerce giant was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City. [The aforementioned link may be paywalled; here's an alternative source.]
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Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says More

Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says

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  • story is paywalled

    • Article Paywalled and the paragraph at top didn't even say which two cities are getting the Amazon HQ. You would have thought they would of included that important information.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by XanC ( 644172 )

        Yes it does:

        "CNBC's Brian Sullivan reported this weekend Amazon could split the proposed workforce and investments between Austin and Northern Virginia."

        • Re: paywalled (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          PLEASE. WE do NOT want those tentacles in the great city of Austin, TX.

      • Re:paywalled (Score:4, Interesting)

        by pci ( 13339 ) <vince.power@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Monday November 05, 2018 @02:58PM (#57595852) Homepage

        The paragraph summary is all the article says. It is all rumors at this point with three cities identified "Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas, and New York City"

        start-article

        Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -2.01% plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, according to a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities.

        The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company’s headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company’s plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems.

        Under the new plan, Amazon would split the workforce with 25,000 employees in each city, the person said.

        Amazon is in advanced talks with multiple cities but hasn’t made a final decision on which two locations it will pick, according to people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that Amazon was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City.

        A decision and announcement could come as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. /end-article

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        They would have included that important information. The great thing about summarizing a story is that it is often difficult to come up with information that the source article does not have.

  • A master, and an apprentice.

    Not just a humorous Star Wars reference, you know that Amazon will make one city a gulag of undesirables, and the other city where all of the golden people go to shine.

    • Amazon is competing with Apple for multiple headquarters. More like the terrible two's than master and apprentice.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Huh... There was actually a company a recruiter was trying to get me to interview at that was pretty much structured that way. They had their location where all the stars went, and their location which, how shall we say, did not feel respected or valued by management.

  • Why have one corporate handout (Score:5, Insightful)

    by liquid_schwartz ( 530085 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @02:57PM (#57595846)
    when you can have two? It's double the incentives.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      That was exactly my thought too when i read this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      Why not have one in each major city? People love everything related to Amazon. Heck, Amazon doesn't have to even turn a profit. They can just collect subsidies, if they want to. Yay, "free market".

  • Brilliant! (Score:3)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @02:58PM (#57595854)
    Then they can play the 2 cities against each other to maximize incentives/bribes!

    • Then they can play the 2 cities against each other to maximize incentives/bribes!

      Or just accept them from both and have two new places to house the slave drivers.... Um... Managers... And laugh all the way to the bank.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      A Sale of Two Titties

  • New York City?!?!? (Score:3)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @02:59PM (#57595860)
    Wouldn't that have the highest costs of any city they considered?
    • Yeah, Bismarck, North Dakota would be far cheaper.
    • Yeah that seems pretty confusing... you'd think they'd want to take advantage of cost of living differences, you could pay the same person a lot less to live somewhere where that paycheck buys an awesome house instead of a lot more for a tiny apartment.
      • Amazon are looking for subsidies. The new HQ will go to the city that pays the most. The staff will receive the lowest amount of money Amazon can possibly pay them.
        Why would Amazon care if their staff are living in a cardboard box under a bridge?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Not only that but competition for talent there is really fierce. Even though I am well outside NYC I get recruiters calling me and talking about how a couple hours on Amtrack per day isn't THAT bad and other people are doing it! I guess NYC is good if you are mostly interested in stealing other people's employees since there is already a big concentration there.
      • Also hard to imagine how NYC would alleviate housing and transit issues associated with the old HQ. Are they planning to move half the Seattle staff to NYC?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jythie ( 914043 )
          Yeah, you have try really hard to find cities with WORSE housing problems, but NYC would fit the bill.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )

        There's apartments where I live (Wilmington, DE) and they are mostly going to people that take the Amtrak daily (or at least quite frequently). It's quite surprising, but I guess it's worth 20k/year to some people for the commute.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jythie ( 914043 )
          Yeah, I know people who actually commute via SEPTA down into Wilmington or up into Philly then take Amtrak up to NYC, and I routinely get recruiters trying to convince me to do the same. Apparently the pay can be a lot better, and I guess to be fair there is a lot of tech work up there that just isn't present in the Trenton/Philly/Wilmington region.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AvitarX ( 172628 )

            Sure, the pay is better, but is the rent THAT much better down this way?

            I figure your saving 20k/year or so (after considering Amtrak vs Subway prices, maybe car ownership vs no need etc.).

            I guess in Delco there's some good schools, and maybe North Wilmington, but in the city where the apartments are getting filled, the Schools are pretty bad.

            I can see taking an NYC job for 40k/year extra (though I wouldn't, and that's a huge portion of what I make here), but to then commute hours each way every day.

            I figur

  • Cerberus (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @03:21PM (#57595994) Journal
    I still don't understand how multiple headquarters is supposed to work. The purpose of a headquarters is to have a place to get ideas in front of the decision maker. Is Bezos going to spend a week each month at each location?

    If he isn't there, it isn't really headquarters. It sounds to me like a giant grift for taxpayer money.

    I've seen similar stunts [wikipedia.org] in the past. [cnn.com]

    • It sounds like an idiotic idea to me too. What companies do is to split into divisions and have the headquarters in one city and divisions headquartered in other cities.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      They probably have large enough departments at this point that they could dedicate various 'HQs' to clusters of divisions of related projects. So 'fully owned subsidiary' comes to mind.

    • Well when you're jeff bezos, you know that you are the best leader that the world has seen since the Pharaohs. So it goes to follow that the best way to run Amazon is to create an army of bezos-clones to run each division with the type of awe-inspiring, brutal intensity that makes us lesser mortals shrivel in fear.

      So once per fiscal year these clones will travel to a secret underground arena where they will engage in a grand melee. With the winner being crowned bezos prime, and run the company until the n

    • It's called, "continuity of business".

      Amazon is one of the largest companies in America. If something like an earthquake or impending volcanic eruption shut down Amazon's Seattle HQ, it would be DEVASTATING for both consumers AND vendors. As in, "could trigger a cascading chain of business failures & recession" devastating.

      Mental image: September 11, 2001. 10:27am. IT guy who just escaped from the WTC South Tower, talking to someone: " Of COURSE we have an emergency data center. It's right over there...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They're still negotiating, the Crystal City location leaked, the other cities won't sweeten the pot any more because they think they're out. In order to keep the cities competing, and Amazon getting the best deal it can, it must keep the cities thinking they can still win if they just add a few more enticements, so it can extract the best deal.

    • Seattle has helped this move forward. If the local government feels they can push around a large company in on geographical area, they will. With 50k workers in the Seattle area, they are stuck with working with the ever expanding demands of the local government. To level the playing field open multiple "headquarters" in other states and play them against each other.

      Ask Seattle how well that worked with Boeing. Oh ya, HQ moved to Chicago. So if the government gets too over the top, they can shift emplo

      • Ask Seattle how well that worked with Boeing. Oh ya, HQ moved to Chicago. So if the government gets too over the top, they can shift employees to the other headquarters.

        There are very few Boeing employees in Chicago. It's an HQ in name only, so they can get a taxpayer funded handout.

  • DC swamp FTW (thanks Google) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @03:25PM (#57596016)
    I'd believe the Crystal City over everything else. That's where a lot of big government/defense deals go down, and Amazon is probably just giggling to itself after some Google employees decided to stage antiwar demonstrations over the past few months. (Heck, if I was Amazon, I might be paying my competitor's employees to act up.) The GCP and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms are for real (unlike, say, Oracle/IBM "clouds") and both work better in many instances than Amazon's, but if Amazon can lock itself in as the first provider of federal cloud services (and just maybe let them look at peoples' purchase history once in a while) then it's smiling all the way to the bank.
  • In that case, I'd have guessed Minneapolis/St. Paul.

  • So what they are saying is that they're gonna have
    HQ 2.1
    and
    HQ 2.b)

    • Actually, I think it's HQ-2.1 and HW-2a. Just so neither feels like it's third-best...

      • Dang! Just noticed it as I hit the button...

        "Actually, I think it's HQ-2.1 and HQ-2a. Just so neither feels like it's third-best..."

  • So... (Score:2)

    by Zorro ( 15797 )

    Both Dallas and Fort Worth.

  • What? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @04:38PM (#57596476)
    "The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems."

    They're concerned about housing for tens of thousands of workers and they're considering New York City as one of the options? I haven't lived there myself, but from everything i've heard decent, reasonably priced housing is not something that can be found in New York City.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Reasonably priced housing is not something that can be found in Crystal City either. The only people I know that work there either commute daily from Richmond (a few even further away) or stay in an extended stay hotel during the week and come home on weekends (it's a lot cheaper). Awful place, all concrete.

  • If you have 3 headquarters, it's not really "headquarters". Just call them "major business centers" or something else big-but-nebulus (which sounds like an alt-rock band).

  • In other words, Dallas and Virginia. (Score:3)

    by Jahoda ( 2715225 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @05:32PM (#57596776)
    They're not going to have two headquarters on the east coast. And, Dallas is super Fortune 100 friendly. Additionally, it has a reasonable cost of living, and the same I am sure can be said of Crystal City, VA. Seems highly unlikely to me you'd want your new HQ in one of the most competitive and expensive labor markets in the country.

    • Crystal City is the opposite of affordable. I mean yeah the actual literally named area of Crystal City has semi-affordable apartments, but not a lot of them and if you want more than the basics you're going to have to look into even pricier areas or endure a horrid commute (and still pretty high prices). Living in the greater DC metro area is cheaper than NYC, but not that much. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of... [numbeo.com]

      Still ... yeah ... NYC seems like an odd choice. Frankly looking at Northern VA I'm surprised a

  • amazon knows what its doing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They are turning in to the same type of defense contractor company. They setup a part of the business in multiple states. The get huge contracts and handouts from the government, states, cities, etc. If the incentives will never dissappear because no senator wants to be responsible for the vote that made amazon leave the area, taking 20k jobs with it. It's the same thing defense contractors do. 18 billion dollar contracts keep flowing into them, and they split the work between multiple state

  • That would be completely idiotic. Pick a city. Stop this nonsense. #FFS

  • Add 25K employees to Crystal City? YGBSM! I thought the plan was to avoid congestion.

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