Amazon to add 100,000 jobs as brick-and-mortar crumbles

And with Amazon’s announcement Thursday that it plans to hire 100,000 new employees in the next 18 months, the Baltimore facility and at least 70 other Amazon fulfillment centers across the country stand to be among the biggest beneficiaries.

Fifteen miles away in the suburbs, all that is left of Owings Mills Mall is rubble, demolition having started in the fall, after the last anchor stores, Macy’s and J. C. Penney, closed within months of each other.

The contrast between the two scenes is an example of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction,” the inevitable process in which new industries rise and replace old ones.

But creation tends to get more press than destruction, and the announcement from Amazon is no exception.