I still keep a folder of HQ2 bid documents on my desktop. Not because I enjoy pain, though the evidence is mounting, but because for eighteen months those PDFs were the most honest artifacts in American branding. Cities wrote them under deadline, in public, with real money on the table. You could read exactly what a place believed it was worth.
Then on February 14 Amazon walked away from Long Island City, and the folder stopped being a case study. It became an autopsy.
Two hundred and thirty eight cities entered. Most of them will now tell you they were realistic about their odds. None of them behaved like it.
Here is the part that gets lost in the argument about tax incentives. The incentives were the smallest thing on the table. Cities also handed over land inventories, permitting timelines, workforce demographics, transit expansion plans, utility capacity, and in some cases detailed maps of every technical worker within commuting distance. Municipal staff produced that research on nights and weekends and shipped it, free, to a company that competes with a good share of the businesses in those same cities.
A contest that only one entrant can win, where every entrant pays to enter, is not a search. It is a data harvest with a ribbon tied around it.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms at a much smaller scale and the same shape. The open pitch. Six agencies, one brief, ninety days, and a request for strategic thinking rather than credentials. Five of those agencies do unpaid work the client keeps. Nobody calls it a data harvest. Everybody knows what it is.
Two things worth holding onto. First, when you run a competitive process, publish what you will do with the losing submissions. That single sentence is the entire ethics of the exercise. Second, the reputational cost of a public search compounds quietly, because every city that lost now has a grievance, a filing cabinet, and a press contact.
Nobody calls it a data harvest. Everybody knows what it is.
Amazon got what it came for and paid in a currency that does not appear on a balance sheet for years. Two hundred and thirty seven municipalities now understand precisely how they were used, and the neighborhood that won understood it well enough to say no.
Portland put a package together too, and I remember how much local optimism went into it. The night the news broke I walked to Powell's and bought a used book about the Mount Hood Freeway, the highway this city fought off in the seventies. Portland has a long memory for being told what it is getting. Amazon just handed that same memory to everybody else.