Re:Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Should Be Illegal
by tmd83 on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @03:08PM
(#18444427)
If it was actually their plan which it very well seems like from the way everyone is talking about, wouldn't this actually be fraud rather than just unfair?
Re:Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Should Be Illegal
by lotsofpulp on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:31PM
(#18445097)
There was no commitment, and there was no false information. How can there be fraud?
I do the same thing Amazon does all the time, to get the best price. I don’t need to be honest and tell the seller I’m using them to get someone else’s price down. Maybe I do go with the new seller if their price is good, maybe it’s not good enough to sway me from the other seller. It’s just business.
Re:Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Should Be Illegal
by tmd83 on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @11:18PM
(#18447450)
I am of course not a lawyer. But there's a whole lot of difference between casually asking a seller a price or haggle vs. asking for a formal bid for something. I think in a formal bid the expectation is that you have a reasonable chance to win given the expense needed to answer a bid.
Re:Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Should Be Illegal
by Apocryphon on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:29PM
(#18445085)
It sounds like the sort of casual fraud that megacorps routinely get away with.
-https://www.consulting.us/news/290/consulting-firms-recruite...
-https://technical.ly/philly/2017/09/13/site-selection-consul...
This is not to mention that cities likely had to hand over demographic data that would've otherwise been very expensive to collect: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hq2-search-data-2018-....
Look at some of the cities that made the finalist list:
-Columbus (population ~880k)
-Denver (population ~700k)
-Indianapolis (population ~870k)
-Nashville (population ~667k)
-Newark (population ~285k)
For these cities, an additional 25k jobs would have been huge. Scott Galloway has advanced the theory that a large goal of the HQ2 search was to secure competing bids, which Amazon then took back to NYC and DC in an attempt to secure better terms. If these "finalist" cities were simply used as stalking horses with ~0% chances of actually winning, I can't help but feel it was a little wrong to induce them to spend the necessary fees on consultants and planners to put together a decent bid.