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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

From Wikipedia:

> A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer.

From the article:

> Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city

True company towns are known for an abusive power dynamic where employers, by controlling employees' income and expenses simultaneously, can force them into debt and make them unable to leave. It's a sort of societal anti-pattern, which our culture recognized and gave a name to. But Amazon in Seattle doesn't fit that antipattern, because it doesn't control its employees' housing or other expenses. I'd rather we didn't dilute the "company town" phrase to refer to cases where a company merely owns lots of office space.

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Ok, let's just avoid that issue. We've changed the title above to the factual statement of the subtitle.

Not sure if you've been to South Lake Union recently (I live nearby) but I think it does fit that description, at least a modern version of it. TONS of Amazon employees live and work in SLU and very close and spend a large amount of their time there. There's a huge internal system of restaurants, cafes, and stores and of course Amazon's own dogfooded grocery stuff.

I mean it's pretty far from a scrip system at a mining town but they're capturing as much of the lives as possible of the people who work there for the two years or so they stick around on average.

So yeah, while it isn't a 'company town' by the original definition it's a modern interpretation of it. Of course Google, Microsoft, FB and others have the same idea - it's a great way to squeeze every drop out of your employees.

That still doesn't sound much like a company town, if all they're doing is setting up convenient stores and services that their employees choose to patronize (or not), rather than making it nearly impossible for their employees to do anything else.

Amazon isn't setting up most of these stores. The overwhelming majority of the businesses in SLU are not owned by or affiliated with Amazon.

> There's a huge internal system of restaurants, cafes, and stores

This made me laugh out loud. The only thing you get at Amazon for free is water and coffee and a $100 credit on Amazon purchases where the seller is Amazon.

There are a handful of coffee shops that are in the buildings that serve some food but that space is leased by those companies. The food and drinks are absolutely not free.

Most Amazon employees go outside to the foodtrucks and buy from there.

I will say that just like most people living in cities a lot of things are purchased through Amazon and so in that sense it is a bit like a company store.

Outside of that, it's just laughably absurd. The employees would be much happier if they got those perks.

> There are a handful of coffee shops that are in the buildings that serve some food but that space is leased by those companies. The food and drinks are absolutely not free.

I think they meant internal to South Lake Union.

> The employees would be much happier if they got those perks.

If they got those perks but had to live in a suburban sprawl like SV? I think it's more of a tradeoff that some people are glad to make.

> I think they meant internal to South Lake Union.

That's an absurd statement though. A company town exploits the workers by making profit from them. Amazon is not doing this. It's clickbait.

Who owns the land that the restaurants in SLU lease? Serious question. It's all been built up so quickly and is all so new -- it looks like it could be Amazon-owned, or that could just be a natural consequence of being built around the same time.

A lot of SLU land is owned by Vulcan (aka Paul Allen). I don't know about Amazon's stuff specifically. I would guess a lot of their real estate is leased.

Half and half - Vulcan owns about thirty acres in and around SLU after Amazon bought a bunch of it from Vulcan. They're planning on buying the other thirty as well over the next ten to twenty years apparently.

I think you misunderstood, the GP didn't imply they were free. In fact, that's kind of the point of the "company town" comparison -- force your employees to spend money in your stores.

Fine, but the cafes and restaurants aren't owned by Amazon.

That's not what Amazon is doing at all.

>"I mean it's pretty far from a scrip system at a mining town but they're capturing as much of the lives as possible of the people who work there for the two years or so they stick around on average."

Interesting, is two years a real average for an Amazon relocation hire in Seattle?

I don't know the answer to your question but two years is the length you have to stay so that you don't have to pay back the relocation bonus. It would not surprise me that many people leave at 2 years.

Yes. I have a friend at Amazon who just finished his fifth year and he confirmed he's already an in the upper quartile of longevity. He estimated a median 'lifespan' of 18 months for Seattle-based devs; it was admittedly a back-of-the-envelope calculation but their turnover is definitely sky-high.

Thanks, any insight into whether this is because of work life balance and culture at Amazon or people simply deciding that Seattle isn't for them?

Oh it's Amazon alright:

https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/

It's the first one.

Not so much a lifespan as an average; Amazon is hiring tens of thousands of people every year.

The relocation benefits have to be paid back (prorated) until two years, so it sounds plausible enough. For what it's worth (not much without numbers on growth and turnover), I've been with them for about 2.5 years and am around the 60th percentile for tenure among Seattle-based employees.

Two years to work off a relo bonus is so absurd. Why does anybody take that deal?

Because they also give you a sign bonus in two parts, a lump sum for the first year, and the second year it is divided between the 12 paychecks. After two years, both the bonus and relocation have vested.

The contracts Amazon offered (at least as of two years ago) were heavy on the starting bonus and grant of stock that you gave up if you quit before two years.

It was apparent from the job offer terms that they didn't expect people to stick around for much longer than that. Most of the future compensation was the promise of more stock grants. No guarantees, and your long term financial future was betting on investors continue to write Bezos a blank check.

To me, Amazon looked like working for a big company with many of the drawbacks of working for a startup. I didn't come away with the impression that you could make a career there.

That's working well for them I guess, but they're well known for their ridiculous employee turnover rate.

Having good food on site is a perq, not a "squeeze every drop".

Food on site is intended to keep your employees on site. There's no other point.

Every other employer provides meal stipends, which employees can use as reimbursement for meals (perk). They also get wider choice and variety. But then they're not in the office.

If you can't afford to build a kitchen, you provide a stipend and a website to order delivery from a rotating array of local restaurants.

Keep food on site, they stay on site, where they can continue to peer-bond, talk about work, and get back to work.

There are company cafeterias and private restaurants and food trucks. Amazon does not force employees to buy food at Amazon cafes. The campus is just in a city where normal city things exist.

> There's no other point.

Having eaten at Google's internal cafe, it is most definitely a perq, and is useful for attracting employee candidates.

perk

It's perq, short for perquisite

Despite that, "perk" is the generally accepted spelling. Sorry, English is weird.

http://grammarist.com/usage/perk-vs-perq/

"The accepted spelling for the abbreviation of perquisite is perk, usually rendered as the plural, perks."

> Every other employer provides meal stipends

If only.

> Every other employer provides meal stipends

Ha, what?

Is that what this argument is about? Are there people so deep inside the tech bubble that they think free onsite meals are a standard feature of employment?

can we guess the ROI on food as company's expense and generated revenue from getting people to stay because of said food?

Despite that bogus use of the term, I found the article surprisingly good. I'm really coming to dislike headline writers (who are usually not the authors of the article).

The headline is blatant clickbait.

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