Amazon's booming South Lake Union still awaiting its dinner crowd

[DonCoquixote]

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/resurgent-south-lake-union-still-awaiting-its-dinner-crowd/


This is why, for whatever good Amazon does in letting people afford and get things, they are limited by the foolish delusions of a mad self styled "genius". You cannot engineer a community. It is not like shipping items. Jeff Bezos is angry that no one stays in the evening. Well, when you have a workforce that is in the suburbs, which is trying to not get docked for being ten seconds late from lunch, exhausted from a commute, do you really expect them to WANT to become part of your "community?" They already spend a large portion of their lives at work, do you think they want to eat dinner there too?

Some corporate cultures act like they are your family, your community, but what they really want is to replace both. They cannot whip and chain people anymore, so they try to seduce. They want to be in the same place where your home and family are, to define the very idea of self. If this was the 60's that might have worked, as people were much more susceptible to utopian fantasies. The Levittowns, the communes, all that stuff both left and right preached. Well, Jeff, you got generations x thru Z to deal with, and all of them know that the job is just the farmer that fattens chickens until they can be fried. Those people making punch cards for lunch so they can scurry back to the cubicle in time will realize even high class fast food is just that, fast food for corporate drones. As far as high end dining, hell, even the better paid ones are dealing with high damned rent; I can imagine many relatives hearing how their son or daughter paid their debt off and got a high paying job, and then they will see they have a small apartment and still have to eat ramen twice a week to stay afloat.

Even the upper middle class in America is in so many ways, poor, poor in freedom to spend and save money, but also poor in community.

By the way, as someone who comes from a restaurant background, how the HELL did these chefs get so naive? No one wants to have dinner at their work, because it usually means they get the risk of the company dragging you in for overtime! Throw in the fact that many of the worker's family are sick of the fact their loved on spends most their life at the job, and now you want them to have dinner there? And the fact they tolerate the Amazon cops making sure they cannot close their business at night when they cannot make money, that is outright fascist!

PPS: Long Island, Virginia, you are so next. Watch those Mom and pop pizzerias die, Watch those Michelin star places die too, because Amazon will try to direct traffic to their new little town.

[brooklynite]

1. South Lake Union is NOT "Amazon"

Amazon IS located there, but so are many other companies. As for the allegation of underpaid worker-bees, consider that Seattle has a VERY energetic food scene and people would go there for dinner if there was a place worth going to. )FWIW - people don't go to dinner in Downtown Seattle either; probably more the last of residential property than which companies are located there).

[melman]

2. 'FWIW - people don't go to dinner in Downtown Seattle either'

Say what? Belltown is full of restaurants. And yes, Belltown is part of downtown.

But even if you want to use a more narrow definition it's still not true. Metropolitan Grill for example is 'downtown' downtown.