When I was a boy, Seattle had a couple of negative handles. Biggest
Tank Town, was one. But the other, even though not 100% true, did
have some truth to it. A One Company Town.
Someone did a take on the popular tune of the day, "Whatever Lola
wants, Lola gets"...and sang, "Whatever Boeing wants, Boeing gets".
Well, times have changed out here in Seattle. It's now a Three
Company Tank Town. Microsoft and Amazon have muscled their way next
to Boeing. And Starbuck is not far off the pace, with a myriad of
young startups all dreaming of making it into the big time.
Meanwhile, Amazon seems to be the going concern among Seattle's
Billionaires, buying up just about anything that moves. And those
Start Ups who dream of riches beyond belief, have figured out that if
you get a hot idea and look like your head is out of the sand, Amazon
will buy you out for a bundle of million dollars. So So multi million
dollar estates are springing up around the East side of Lake
Washington and North of the City, while thousands of working class
laborers are forced to move into the growing slums between Seattle and
Tacoma. The house Cathy and I bought for $80 thousand back in 1981,
and sold in 1994, for $156 thousand, is now being advertised for $289
thousand. Newer houses in the neighborhood are going for $350
thousand, to $550 thousand. And this was a mostly "Middle Class"
neighborhood. Small business owners, management types like me, and
clever technological folks like those young, eager brains who contract
with Microsoft. My grandson is one such person. He signs a contract
every year for around $80 thousand dollars a year. Sounds good. But
he pays his medical insurance, his retirement and vacation, and has to
buy most of the tools he uses, such as state of the art computers. He
can't afford to buy our old home. Thousands of young contractors
can't afford to buy that house.
Corporations such as Starbucks and Microsoft and Amazon are buying
cheap labor, but driving the cost of living out through the roof.
Any idiot who can stop drooling for a moment, can see that the entire
mess is going to implode. It will be, on a giant scale, like the rise
and fall of the Roman Empire.
A thousand years from now school children will wonder, as they read
their version of Ancient History, how people back then could not see
the roof caving in.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/28/18, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is Amazon buying up everything? I get my prescriptions from a pharmacy
in Manchester, New Hampshire called Pill Pack. I came across it because
quite some time ago I signed up with an outfit called A1 Medical Supply.
I signed up with them because they ship my diabetic supplies through the
mail and so all I have to do is to go outside to my mailbox to pick them
up. Every time I talk to them on the phone they try to push some other
service of theirs or push some other company that they have struck a
deal with. Usually I decline the offer, but once they were pushing Pill
pack and the offer sounded like just what I needed. Pill Pack ships my
drugs to me and that arrives at my door too, so I don't have to get out
to a drugstore. That is about the last thing I would have expected to be
acquired by Amazon, but I just got an email from them informing me that
it just happened. So now I suppose I will be buying my drugs from Amazon
and I didn't even decide to do so.
