Grinnell, IA New Amazon Headquarters

BURLING LIBRARY – HQ2 : Amazon’s second headquarters, dubbed “The Amazon on the Prairie”, will be built in Grinnell, sources familiar with the matter said, instead of any of the 20 cities on its recently released shortlist. The headquarters, which will be a 46 stories with a large Amazon sign on the side, docks for drones, and offices with large windows for executives to gaze out on postindustrial middle America and contemplate whether they are going to hell or not, will be built directly on top of Burling Library.

Though Grinnell meets few of the requirements Amazon originally stated for HQ2, such proximity to a large metropolitan area and an international airport, Amazon executives ultimately decided to go back to the drawing board and reject all of the twenty shortlisted proposals in cities with dynamic economies and prominent research institutions and pick Grinnell because of its exponentially-growing Computer Science Department.

“We figured that because the CS department has too many students for their own good, we’d do the decent thing and alleviate some of the burden by hiring some of its students. We’ll have no trouble recruiting budding software engineers—none of our current employees want to pack up and move to Iowa, and why should they, when there’s plenty of fresh meat here?” said Amazon spokesman John Polony.

Asked why Grinnell submitted a bid in the first place, President Burger Kington said they“figured why the hell not” and also thought this would be a good way to develop the innovation and entrepreneurship-focused Wilson Center.

“We’re trying to position Grinnell as a traditional liberal arts school that is also a leader in innovation, disruption, hedgehogs, cloud-based analytics, leveraging patented semantic intelligence technology, optimization, bees, markets, and all the other buzzwords like that”explained Burger Kington. “It makes it look like I’m embracing the future so that when I leave here in three years, 47 days, 22 hours, and 35 minutes to go to a bigger and better university, I have better prospects.”

Burger K also consulted with zero students before he made the deal with Amazon, but did confirm an upcoming Community Hour about it four Tuesdays from now.

Amazon also cited self-gov as a reason for coming to Grinnell.

“We were really attracted to Grinnell’s focus on self-government as it will give us the ability to quietly test the technology we plan to create as part of our strategic initiative to disrupt the current retail landscape by rendering nation-states utterly incapable of regulating corporations and ultimately creating a worldwide shadow government built on Amazon’s position as the only way to buy, sell, or consume goods and services after we’ve wiped out everybody else, burn their crops, and slain their cattle. I am Odysseus, raider of cities! Of course, we won’t conduct tests after eleven pm on weekdays and one am on weekends so as to respect quiet hours,” said Ellen Patel, Amazon’s chief officer of university-policy and deep state creation.

Asked what he thought about that prospect, an econ major said “the market will self regulate.”

As part of the deal with Grinnell, Amazon will introduce Grinnell-specific services to students and staff. These services will include Alexa Baked Ziti, which tells you how long the line for baked ziti is, Amazon PigShit, an AI-powered app to determine the quantity of porcine fecal particles in the air, and PrimeHarris, a platform to let you find a classically-trained method actor to go to Harris as your stand-in for when you feel socially obligated to go but can’t handle that right now.

Amazon will also introduce dash buttons for your P-card, which they retrieved using drones after you dropped it near Bucksbaum.

Amazon will also be building an adequately-staffed student health center.

While the Burling tower is being built, Amazon will house itself in the new humanities and social sciences complex, meaning that the HSSC will not actually be available to students until 2031.