Amazon occupies a far too large area of Seattle, it's got over 40+ buildings in South Union Lake district of Seattle. All of them are extremely boring, glass monoliths with no retail stores to ground them. This is where culture goes to die, replaced by the machine-efficiency of Amazon's underpaid and poorly treated labor. Stores are just inefficient in the software dudebro's worldview, why get nasty with the randos when everything you will ever desire will just appear at your doorstep. Instead, take all the fuckin' money in the world your bank account can carry and throw it at absurdly priced apartment buildings. Have fun.
And now they've got a few automated amazon stores, you need to have an amazon account and a registered phone to get into those. The machines figure out using cameras and chips what items you picked off of the shelves, and charge you automatically as you walk out, no cashiers required. From this view, people are the problem with the world, without other human beings, the world would be much simpler, cleaner and a better place to live.
I like Seattle the city in general. I fucking hate, despite, absolutely abhor what a large part of city and collective mindspace Amazon occupies. They bring tax and jobs to the city, yes, but it almost feels to me like they're going out of their way to be bad tenants, as if they want to show the publicly elected officials the middle fingers, show them who's the boss, and threaten them with their vision of the grand future where the technocratic kings are the rulers, and all of us mere peasants in their fiefdoms.
They do have sick public art outside the offices though. Don't know if they sponsored those, regardless, at least work driving around once. What a dead neighborhood it is, the Amazon office area, worst place to live I can think of.
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