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It may be fortuitous for Amazon that Black Friday is coming so close in the wake of its selection of cities for HQ2, its long-awaited new headquarters.
We can understand that among the many American cities that have expressed their hopes and dreams, not to mention the billions of dollars in promised tax cuts, some are bent on competing with HQ2 and the 50,000 well-paying jobs that society has promised to create, namely to see Amazon choose the fully predictable sites of the suburbs of Washington DC, in Crystal City, Virginia, and Long Island City, New York, from the East River to Manhattan. As the reaction against QG2 began to make itself felt, Black Friday comes to shift our focus to something else.
You came here to read about the offers, yes? Here are the five best black Friday available on Amazon, according to USA Today. At Quartz, we can also inform you of the many offers you can find on Amazon (and in physical stores) this weekend. Delish, Fast Company, CNN, BGR, CNET and many others also have your back. You can even go directly to the source and view Amazon's press release, which features "Seven Days of Black Friday Market".
Still thinking about HQ2 now?
Of course, HQ2 was in itself a brilliant diversion. Amazon announced its search for a second North American headquarters in September 2017, at a time of discomfort for Big Tech. Congress was planning to regulate Facebook, Twitter and Google. Facebook's lead counsel had been called to testify (Mark Zuckerberg would follow him later); Amazon, fresh out of its purchase of Whole Foods, was raising more eyebrows for monopoly reasons. Energy brokers in Silicon Valley agreed that a technical reaction was underway.
HQ2 changed the story. What better way to defer criticism and skepticism than to land a grand prize for hundreds of North American cities and fear losing by a small faux pas? Or to make sure that local politicians do not investigate the conditions of the warehouse or do not respond to the cries of Donald Trump that Amazon is a monopoly, only with a big stakes competition that has kept them on their behavior the best and the most sycophant?
There are probably as many reasons to scrutinize Amazon as to scan Facebook. Amazon, like Facebook, collects huge amounts of data about its users. Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business, is the de facto backbone of many Internet companies. Its policies on workers, in warehouses and at headquarters are debatable. Amazon's antitrust potential is serious. Its facial recognition technology has been presented to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Yet Amazon has been crowned one of the most trusted American institutions behind the military in an online survey conducted this summer, while Facebook has proven to be one of the least reliable.
In the United States, about 60 million households subscribe to Amazon Prime. If members of these households were worried about the company's HQ2 process before, their critics are sure to drown now. Amazon's Black Friday offers and its promotion Aquaman – the main members can see the movie a week in advance – are almost there.
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