Note: This is the seventh in a series of quarterly reports produced by Good Jobs First that look at the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economic development.
Good Jobs First has been documenting the economic development subsidies Amazon.com and its subsidiaries have received for over a decade. You can find the money Amazon has extracted from U.S. communities at our database, Amazon Tracker.
As of this publication, we’ve documented $6.7 billion, though you’ll note many entries list the subsidy value as “undisclosed.” In a recent report, we documented another $520 million Amazon took from other countries.
Amazon is one of the world’s largest companies and it’s run by one of the world’s richest men in Jeff Bezos. When communities support Amazon, they are paying the global giant to do what it would already do: it needed to build warehouses for rapid shipping, it needed to build studios for its wanna-be foray into the fashion industry, it needed money to build more overpriced grocery stores, and now it needs to build giant data centers for the artificial intelligence applications that require gobs of energy.
Economic development subsidies were never intended to simply boost profits for well-established, highly profitable companies. They were meant to spur – indeed, incentive – investments that wouldn’t have otherwise have happened.
Instead, every dollar Amazon takes for its highly paid leaders and shareholders is money that didn’t go to fix roads, reduce class sizes, offset childcare costs or boost after-school programs.
This holiday season, let’s do ourselves a favor and give communities big and small, and far and wide a true holiday gift: Let’s End Amazon Subsidies.