Wired 7.03: The Inner Bezos
Old article about Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos, but it's still a good read. Great quote about why Amazon chose Washington for its headquarters:
It starts with the realization that in fact not everything should be virtual - that Amazon.com should own its own warehouses, so that it can maintain quality control over the packaging and shipping of orders, which Bezos sees as an essential opportunity to enhance the Amazon.com customer experience. This allows the company to combine orders for books from multiple publishers - or orders that include a book, a CD, and a video - into single packages. It also gives Amazon.com employees who pack orders a chance to check for defective goods. In its music department, for example, the company will replace cracked or broken CD jewel cases. Locating in Seattle, therefore, wasn't about being near a technology hub as much as it was about being near one of Ingram's distribution facilities, which allowed for quicker turnaround on deliveries from that key supplier. And Washington had a relatively small population, which limited the pool of potential customers from whom Amazon.com would be forced to collect sales tax. (It's no accident that the company's second warehouse is in Delaware, which not only has no sales tax but is also an ideal base for serving East Coast customers; its third and latest warehouse is near Reno, Nevada - which lets Amazon.com originate deliveries close to the huge California population, but just outside that state's tax-collection borders.)
