They are golf umbrellas. Amazon employees come from places where golf is played, such as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Arizona. they would be homesick with those golf umrelllas that for them, are a symbol of home.

Totally with you, Charles.

Ah, finally an issue worthy of Charles' attention!

haha I won't go to SLU. Fuck that place, it's a mini Bellevue and lame as hell.

A big umbrella is both useful and fun. Please stop trying to police how others enjoy keeping dry.

Charles, you should find another job, perhaps as a creative writer for poetry books.

THAT's where all those orange umbrellas are coming from! I've actually been wondering. I don't feel so bad stealing them now for my growing umbrella collection.

So on one hand, they can make sense if a bunch of people are all using one large umbrella to go to lunch together. If 3 people all had small umbrellas, the sidewalk situation would be worse than 3 ppl under one large bumbershoot.

On the other hand, if only one person is under the thing, it does become a little overmuch.

The orange-white color makes good sense in gray Seattle, as it gives excellent visibility to the inarticulate and sensory-deprived automobiles. I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't give out LED light up umbrellas. This is 2017 after all. We're just two years away from replicants.

I think, though, the proposal for "banning" large umbrellas is clearly insane. People should just use vigilante justice to solve the problem, not rely on the fascist-nanny state to solve our problems for us.

Charles just needs to carry a quick-light blowtorch with him, so he can simply light the big, offensive umbrellas on fire...leading to an ironic demise of the repellent parasols.

You would think that Charles Mudede, of all people, would appreciate the fact that Amazon employees are walking around its urban headquarters in obnoxiously big umbrellas rather than driving around its exurban headquarters in obnoxiously big automobiles.

I realize that there's only so much context or perspective you can cram into a blog post, but for chrissakes, half the time these days the uber-urbanist Mudede sounds like the anti-urbanists whose self-contradictions can often be summed up by that Yogi Berra-ism, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Charles' pieces are starting to read like conspiracy theory blog posts.

Like Charles, I hate dodging umbrellas on a crowded sidewalk. May be it has to do with being eye level with those poky things and some people being oblivious to the menace they represent.

See, I would have thought this going the other way. Mandatory umbrellas for all Seattle employers, because workers' rights. Or socialized umbrellas for all, because socialism.

Hey, anyone remember when Seattle tried a public umbrella program? I tried but couldn't find any Stranger comment about that one.

We need to publicly shame them for their anti-Seattle ways

@8 for the only sane counter-argument here

Chuck has significant "issues" with "big umbrellas".... I'm guessing it's because his own frail little "umbrella" is woefully inadequate.

What really pisses me off is that people like Chuck pitch a hissy fit over big umbrellas because they "hog sidewalk space" (WTF does that even mean around here??? I mean, common... pedestrian traffic aint THAT dense yet) but they have no problem when a hobo builds a fucking three room shanty shack in the middle of a sidewalk.

It's shameful that so many civic and thought leaders in the region would support and encourage high paying jobs with a promising future. And those free umbrellas are just the harbinger of what to expect when you add large numbers of young, well-educated, highly-skilled, generally progressive thinking workers to any city. Don't say you weren't warned!

I don't hate umbrellas - heck I have one myself, but it is a modestly one person sized model... That said these space hogging, me first, all mine umbrellas do speak to the general attitude of the typical Amazonian, millennial, import worker, who wants everything here for themselves, immediately - including our very houses, which they feel we should move out of to create more space and cheaper prices in the (now) trendiest of neighborhoods where they now desire to live, but haven't yet saved enough to afford.

Amazon will never be satisfied. Having the entire sidewalk to itself will not be enough. They will want streets closed off to all but themselves. They will buy important central spaces and turn them into soulless offices. They will depress the housing market and rail about the quality of the schools while objecting to the taxes that support them. They see nothing wrong with any of this. Amazon is like the Queen Mother: "People think I'm nice. I'm Not Nice."

I’d love to see the musty mountain of poorly-kept binders containing all the regulations you’d have to follow not to earn Charles Mudede’s ire.

Wah wah wah — the globally-diverse urban employer gives out loaner umbrellas that don’t conform to my preferred maximum diameter. Christ, Charles. This blows way past Andy-Rooney-style grumpiness into full-blown bureaumania.

Charles please keep up with this, I live for the comments on these articles because they can't live with a little hyperbole from their alt weekly. You're the best.

More and more, the Stranger covers Amazon the way Fox news covers Obama. If there is any kind of problem, the cause must be Amazon. If something is related to Amazon, then that something must be a bad thing. More than that, it's never a mere causal connection--the bad thing must be the result of a moral defect in Amazon or its employees.