On Thursday, the technology behemoth Amazon canceled its plans to build a new headquarters in New York City.
The decision robs the city of 25,000 potential jobs at a value of $2.5 billion a year in salaries. Such is the going rate for software engineers and computer programmers. And the employees are on the young side. The kind that start families, attend church and join parent/teacher associations.
Amazon spent two years entertaining dozens of bids from among more than 200 cities before settling on the NYC site, announcing the decision in November. At the same time, a sister site of equal size for outside of Washington, D.C., was decided as well as a smaller Operations of Excellence for Nashville, with 5,000 jobs there.