Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis

Author:Alec MacGillis [MacGillis, Alec]
Language: eng
Format: epub

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Across the land, the bidding for the second headquarters grew only more intense, now that it was narrowed to twenty finalists. City governments strapped for time and money spent countless hours and dollars fine-tuning their proposals, hiring consultants, primping for the eventual visit by the suitor.

Above all, they piled ever-greater incentives on the table. Exactly how much was unknown in most cities, as the suitor had ordered contenders to keep negotiations confidential or be dropped from consideration, an insistence on secrecy all the more striking given the public nature of the overall spectacle. Even city council members who would eventually have to approve the packages being offered were barred from knowing the details for the time being. Indianapolis required four hundred employees to sign nondisclosure agreements. Montgomery County, Maryland, in the Washington suburbs, responded to a Freedom of Information Act request by turning over a ten-page document that was completely redacted, every line blacked out in prison stripes. Cleveland redacted its title page and table of contents. Of the 238 bids, 124 were completely secret. “We are not releasing documents related to Amazon HQ2. We are not subject to F.O.I.A.,” said the head of the public-private partnership handling Miami’s bid, echoing similar rejections in Austin, Atlanta, and Indianapolis.

Here and there, some numbers emerged, exposing the scale of the bidding underway. Columbus offered more than $2 billion. Chicago said it would return to Amazon the $1.32 billion in personal income taxes paid by its workers every year. Maryland approved a $6.5 billion package. Newark—which, it would be revealed a couple years later, was at that very moment failing to keep lead out of its drinking water—offered $7 billion.

Also cloaked were the company’s visits to inspect the sites. Vague details slipped out—some cities had taken the visitors on boat tours, others on bikes. The key, it was agreed, was to be accommodating without appearing desperate, to avoid the sort of tacky baubles and over-the-top luxuries that so many of the failed first-round bidders had dangled. Things were serious now. The visitors wanted to know the SAT scores of local high school graduates, an echo of Jeff Bezos’s famous obsession with knowing the scores of those interviewing for jobs at Amazon. They wanted to ride the buses and the trams.

With the process so hidden, bidders grasped at any clues they could find. Alaska Airlines had added a direct flight from Seattle to Columbus! The dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science was resigning—perhaps to run a Pittsburgh HQ2?

And Jeff Bezos was spotted in Miami with a club promoter known as Purple. “It’s not everyday you get to hang with the richest guy in the world,” Purple gushed on Instagram. The Miami Herald seized on the sighting: “Could this be good news for Miami’s HQ2 bid?”

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