Amazon just announced the most boring possible list of 20 locations for their HQ2

Amazon announced their shortlist of 20 sites for their HQ2. Other than as a publicity stunt, I can’t imagine what they actually did in Phase 1 to get here.

There are no surprises here. There are no dark horse cities with special characteristics that show an ability to think outside the box. There seems to be nothing here but a brute force review of population and ability for the city/state to throw money at their future HQ2.

Don’t get me wrong, this seems like almost every HQ search that I’ve been part of. This is more public than those others but the shortlist is pretty close. Here are some highlights:

• Only 1 Pacific time option with Los Angeles. I’m surprised they even included one as Seattle already covers this time zone and one of the advantages Amazon is likely trying to take advantage of is an improved time zone overlap with Europe.
• Only 1 Mountain time option with Dever. See bullet above.
• Only 3 “Southern US” options (I’m excluding Miami as that is its own thing) with Raleigh, Nashville, and Atlanta. I expected at least one outlier here with either Greenville or Birmingham as a dark horse. This is a growing region with intriguing opportunities for an innovative site selection process to take advantage of.
• No smaller locations, no heartland locations. Again, this reflects more of a “do what everyone else does” style of approach than anything else.

If you are trying to pick a list of cities/states to simply compete against each other to maximize your incentives, this is almost a perfect list. Amazon is still moving in the right direction by giving them the advantages of both the East/West coasts of the US for HQ operations. The 3-hour time zone difference can actually make a big difference to global companies.

It’s a conservative list and the only thing surprising is the lack of surprises.