Comment by g947o 5 days ago
These bastards drove out some nice stores near me (supposedly the lease ended and did not renew) and rebuilt the buildings in order to open an Amazon Fresh location. That Amazon Fresh store never opened. Now we have a giant empty storefront nobody uses.
Reminds me of the time they made towns all around the US do a dog and pony show to attract "HQ2" and then just located it where Bezos wanted to be all along. I remember AOC getting it right all along, she did the most milktoast of pushback in her district and it caused Amazon to huff and puff and just walk away(causing many property speculators to lose out). She got raked over the coals but a few years later and the place HQ2 ended up didn't fare so well. AOC was vindicated.
My hope is that more towns learn from your experience and don't tolerate this nonsense anymore.
HQ2 ended up in Crystal City, Virginia, which is a commercial district of Arlington County, and it’s fine. The pandemic-driven remote work trend led Amazon to scale back the number of buildings.
The state and localities did a good job structuring incentives so everything was tied to milestones, some of which Amazon ended up not hitting. My recollection is that NY was offering to give a lot more away, which helped fuel the backlash, but don’t quote me on that.
It also helped in VA that Crystal City has been a commercial wasteland for many years thanks to DoD decentralization. A lot of offices moved down to Fort Belvoir and surrounding areas, leaving Crystal City with a lot of vacant office space. Nothing was being “lost” by Amazon coming in.
Local real estate agents put “HQ2” in their listings for a few years but it didn’t matter much because homes near Crystal City were already super expensive.
I often make spelling and grammatical errors due to my declining typing ability. At least at this time that can help prove that I am not a bot for the time being (I think?)
John Oliver analyzed state's tax rebates, 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc , he concluded that giving 1000 people Ferraris to drive around a pile of $30 million cash on fire would be more fiscally responsible...
I found it pretty funny when Mayor Mamdani of NYC pointed out that the people opposing him spent more money trying to stop him being elected than they would end up paying in increased taxes. It really is a game to those people. They can't bear to give up one cent or one ounce of control.
Another funny story was that some substack writer (whom I forget sorry) noticed that Bill Ackman subscribed to their substack and used a 30% off coupon ha ha.
Jeff Bezos in FY 2024 filed for, and received, a $2k child tax credit.
While the company he was the founder of passed over a trillion dollars in market cap.
Wait, how does a store that never opened drive out an existing store? That’s not how commercial leases work…
Given that a supermarket abandoned that location, and Amazon never opened on their either, perhaps that location or the lease price simply doesn’t work for a grocery store?
And then the new lessee just doesn’t finish the new building so it’s no longer possible to build on the land without tearing down or finishing the project at great cost to any new lessee. Which would be waste but you’d have to take Amazon or whatever shell company they used to court.
sounds like you have an opportunity to open a grocery store?
Same here. A local grocery store and several other local businesses got bought out and demolished so Amazon could build a new Fresh store.
I guess Amazon pulled out of the project halfway through, since for the last ~2 years there's been a half-finished building just sitting there completely abandoned in our town center.