Monday, October 2, 2017

Amazon and Connecticut--A Good Match?

Plenty of pundits have already weighed in on the issue, but I feel compelled to comment on the Amazon search for a second headquarters, because the question emphasizes both the benefits and deficits of Connecticut.  Everyplace in the country is competing, so we should strut our stuff as well.

They want a place with access to a skilled workforce.  We have that in abundance.  Our higher education system is good, and our proportion of highly educated workers is above most other locations.  We also have lots of people looking for good jobs, or leaving the state because they can't find them.

Amazon is a distribution company at heart.  Its real mission is to get you what you want, when you want it. That's different from manufacturing, or even from most retail businesses.  Rather than having a unique product, they have a unique delivery and distribution system, because they both store and consign items.  They ship from other places and other companies, even from other distributors, and they do so on a timeline that's very hard to beat.  Where is Connecticut located?  Right between the Northeastern hubs of NYC and Boston.  Our future is, as some have said, in distribution.  We are too high-cost to manufacture some things, and too small to have the population to use all the goods ourselves.  But we can ship in every direction.  And we have excess real estate at reasonable prices.

So why aren't we on the short list?  Probably we never made the long list, and that would be because we have a reputation for being a tough place to do business.  Not just expensive, since both Boston and NYC can beat us on that front, but unfriendly and anti-business.  We are almost alone in our own quadrant there, although Vermont is probably nearby. 

It certainly doesn't help that Hartford is poised to file for bankruptcy, we have no state budget, and we have union contracts that are far more generous that the states around us, or anywhere.  If you were outside the State, reading the papers, would you consider us?  I certainly hope so, for the reasons above.  And I hope even more that the Legislature and the Governor's cabinet do everything they can to address the issues in this paragraph. 

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