The news that Jeff Bezos is leaving Seattle feels like a bookend, of sorts — not a doomsday moment for the city, by any stretch, but perhaps the symbolic end of an era.
Maybe even that’s going too far. But thinking about it this morning did inspire me to dig out this old issue of Newsweek magazine (above) from my storage bins.
The cover story by Jerry Adler in the May 20, 1996, issue is like a glossy time capsule. I’ve kept it over the years because of the way it captures a key moment in time in our corner of the world. It’s fascinating to read with the knowledge of everything that has happened here in the decades since.
Sooner or later, it seems, everyone moves to Seattle, or thinks about it, or at least their kids do. The city is a demographic paradox, a place whose population — 532,900 in 1995 — is essentially stable, yet which seems to visitors (who don’t often get to working-class neighborhoods) to consist entirely of people who were born somewhere else. Rootless youths seeking alienation beneath Seattle’s brooding skies, but with plenty of girls to keep them company. Middle-aged strivers betting that Microsoft can create one more millionaire. Even those constrained to spend the 21st century in some less-favored city will inevitably feel the tug of Seattle’s gloom.
The piece goes on to name-check some of the iconic brands from the region, including Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, and, of course, Nirvana and Pearl Jam. This passage is especially interesting to look back on:
The main thing Microsoft and Starbucks have in common is that they essentially invented their businesses. This, says Scott Bedbury, Starbucks’s senior vice president for marketing, is characteristic of companies in this part of the country. “We’re not dragging 200 years of baggage with us,” he says. “We’re not looking to our peers in the industry to grab a piece of their business. We’re looking to the consumer.”
Of course, one guy who was already in the area at the time would go on to grab big pieces of business from established industries by focusing on the customer, and his omission is perhaps the biggest flaw in the piece, in hindsight.
Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle in 1994 to start what would become “Amazon.com Inc.,” as he described it in the archival video (above) that he posted Thursday on Instagram along with news of his move to Miami. Here’s how Brad Stone described Bezos’ decision in his 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers. While the area was still a remote urban outpost known more for its grunge rock than its business community, Microsoft was hitting its stride in nearby Redmond, and the University of Washington produced a steady stream of computer science graduates. Seattle was also close to one of the two big book distributors: Ingram had a warehouse a six-hour drive away, in Roseburg, Oregon. And local businessman Nick Hanauer, whom Bezos had recently met through a friend, lived there and urged Bezos to give Seattle a try. He would later be pivotal in introducing Bezos to potential investors.
I love reading about these serendipitous moments from the past. A big part of our jobs as reporters is trying to figure out what’s happening now, big and small, that will have the same kind of meaning decades in the future.
So how deeply should Seattle feel the sting of Bezos’ decision to bolt? Time and technological progress have made that a complicated question. In fundamental ways, it’s a much different world today than it was 27 years ago, including the fact that a person’s physical place in the world doesn’t matter quite as much as it did back then.
Along those lines, this passage from the 1996 Newsweek article was prescient, about cover subject Michael Kinsley’s discussion with Microsoft about where he would work as editor of Slate, the tech company’s “digital magazine.”
His first reaction was that he could put out a better magazine in the East, near the drones who generate cultural and political buzz. “They told me cyberspace makes distance irrelevant,” he says. “I said, that’s my point, I can do this from a computer in Chevy Chase. … And they said, no, we want you here for the synergy.”
Yes, even back then, tech companies were debating remote work.
Farewell from Seattle, Jeff. Come back and see us sometime.
