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Online merchant giant Amazon is currently planning on constructing a second headquarters and cities are practically jumping over each other to be chosen. This isn’t surprising as not only will an Amazon HQ be good for several economic sectors, it could also mean 50,000 well-paying jobs for the locals. Unfortunately for metro areas with fewer than one million people, they are already excluded from the selection.
The population aspect for choosing the city makes a lot of sense from a structural point of view since the second Amazon HQ will reportedly be 8 million square feet, Bloomberg reports. There are very few cities that can handle that kind of construction since logistics would present a huge problem in smaller metros. Not to mention the strain in the labor force.
Even so, the cities that are capable of hosting such a construct are currently in a bidding war that is difficult to compare to anything. The closest it would come to are bids to host the Summer Olympics.
More to the point, if the 50,000 positions to be filled is actually the real deal, even an area like that of Pittsburgh with over 2.35 million might not even be in the running. This is due to its labor force not really growing all that much, which is not ideal for Amazon.
Contrary to what some might be saying with regards to the new building, the company is stressing that this is not a marketing ploy. Amazon claims that it will be a full-fledged headquarters and not just some satellite building for storing stuff, NBC News reports. Hence the requirement of being 45 minutes away from airports.
"Amazon expects to hire new teams and executives in HQ2, and will also let existing senior leaders across the company decide whether to locate their teams in HQ1, HQ2 or both," a statement from the company reads.
