Now that Seattle is not on Amazon’s final list for HQ2 (jobs! growth! prosperity!), which has 20 cities that have no chance of beating the one among them, voluptuous Toronto. Now that the music of this exhausting pageant excludes meat-and-potatoes Seattle, should she continue being so obsequious to the e-commerce global giant? Recall that in December Amazon sent a letter to Seattle’s leading politicians (five councilmembers, five state senators, seven others), who so desperately wanted to “hit the refresh button.” These men and women, Bruce Harrell and Lisa Herbold among them, wanted to make sure that Amazon understood that Seattle was not some unfriendly or ungrateful sod. Make no mistake, HQ2 had shown them the error of their ways.
In the letter, Amazon told Seattle it had pumped, by their estimate, $38 billion into the local economy between 2010 and 2016. The corporation wanted those keen on pressing the refresh button to place that huge figure right in the middle of their minds and to give it long and hard thinking.
Amazon proposed a “roundtable discussion in January at [its] offices” to chew on these matters. It’s right now January. And Seattle woke up today, around the middle of this month, to find it’s not in the running. And according Lisa Herbold’s office, this meeting of contrition and discipline has not happened. But at this point, why should it? What’s the use of resetting anything? The game is up. Toronto won. Seattle should move on. There are other fish in the sea. That kind of thing. Unless the economy suffers a huge crash (which is likely), there will in a decade be another city, Toronto, that’s as important to Amazon’s operations as Seattle.
