Amazon Announces They are Abandoning Seattle for Good

Even a far leftwing company like Amazon cannot stand the People’s Republic of Seattle any longer. They have 45,000 employees in Seattle and job openings for another 10,000 and all of the jobs are high-paying ones.

But, by 2023, Amazon will have no employees in Seattle and a building being erected in Seattle, which Amazon had previously agreed to lease, are now left without a tenant. Amazon is moving just across the lake to Bellevue, Washington. The Seattle city council is to the far left of Moscow and have come up with new and expensive taxes to force businesses to pay for their extremist agenda.

Geekwire reports:

Amazon plans to relocate its entire Seattle-based worldwide operations team to Bellevue, Wash., by 2023, adding thousands of employees to its new campus just across Lake Washington, according to an internal email obtained by GeekWire.

Moving a large and critical team away from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters is a significant relocation of employees on its own, but it’s also a weighty symbolic gesture — the clearest sign yet that the tech giant is cooling on its hometown while doubling down on a neighboring city.

Sources familiar with the plans said several thousand employees will be moving to Bellevue in the years ahead. Amazon confirmed the authenticity of the email obtained by GeekWire.

Worldwide operations is one of the most critical teams at Amazon, the arm responsible for getting packages to customers’ doors. It oversees more than 175 operating fulfillment centers around the world and the 250,000 employees who work there. The team also manages Amazon’s thousands of delivery truck trailers and its fleet of 40 airplanes. New logistics initiatives, like Amazon’s “Delivery Service Partners” program, also fall under the worldwide operations purview.

Amazon will start moving employees to Bellevue this month and will finish the migration by 2023. The company currently has 700 employees in Bellevue and more than 45,000 at its Seattle headquarters.

It would take some time for Amazon’s Bellevue team to grow to a size that rivals Seattle, but moving the worldwide operations team is a big step in that direction. The migration adds weight to the theory that Amazon is shifting its focus to Bellevue and other cities across the country amid ongoing tensions between the tech giant and its longtime hometown.

Why would Amazon move one of its most essential teams out of the company’s Seattle headquarters? Amazon hasn’t yet commented publicly, but there are a few possible reasons.

The move allows Amazon to continue tapping the Seattle region’s deep talent pool but lets the company escape some of the friction it is experiencing in its hometown.

Bellevue was Amazon’s original birthplace, but CEO Jeff Bezos moved the company’s headquarters to Seattle’s urban core early on. He said the goal was to provide the type of urban environment that young, dynamic tech workers thrive in. But fast-forward to 2019 and the tech industry’s rapid growth has fomented frustration among longtime Seattleites who have whiplash from how quickly the city is changing.

That animosity came to a head last year, when Seattle officials passed a tax on big businesses, like Amazon, to fund affordable housing, a pressing issue in the region. The business community balked at the tax, leading the city to repeal it less than a month later. The fight over the so-called “head tax” became emblematic of Amazon’s strained relationship with Seattle.

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