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Business. Sociology. Technology. Nonfiction. HTML: An award-winning journalist investigates Amazon's impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States. In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth "a billion dollars" that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, it seems, entered the age of one-click America�??and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only intensify. Alec MacGillis's Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company's growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon's sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated. Ranging across the country, MacGillis tells the stories of those who've thrived and struggled to thrive in this rapidly changing environment. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic black neighborhood. In suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their neighborhood from the environmental impact of a new data center. Meanwhile, in El Paso, small office supply firms seek to weather Amazon's takeover of government procurement, and in Baltimore a warehouse supplants a fabled steel plant. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering listeners through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos's lavish Kalorama mansion. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality�??not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country's winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux… (more)
User reviews
Throughout the book, there are droppings of dramatic facts, but they are usually not explored beyond the simple statement of them:
-Sellers on Amazon had great difficulty paying 15% for the privilege. That 15% was usually more than their entire profit margin. Today, Amazon’s fees amount to more like 27%.
-Amazon has a code of Leadership Principles. Prominent among them: “Leaders are tenacious and have conviction. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.”
-One Amazon warehouse worker in 10 in Ohio is on food stamps, and Amazon ranks in the top five of employers whose staff is on food stamps in at least five states.
-Amazon is responsible for the destruction of about 76,000 retail jobs – every year.
-Warehouse accidents at Amazon are twice the national average.
But Macgillis doesn’t weigh those statements. That’s not what the book is about. Macgillis barely mentions antitrust, Congressional hearings, union organizing, copying hot selling products and selling them itself, or putting “interior competitors” (outside sellers on the site) out of business. It is instead a series of biographies, down to extraordinary personal and trivial detail, almost none of which is relevant to working at Amazon. Their jobs are unsatisfying, short term, and low-paying. It’s no different at Amazon warehouses. People in dire straits have difficulties in relationships, difficulties with their health, and of course difficulties with money. Amazon has little or nothing to do with it.
There is a puzzling amount of nostalgia for the good days of Bethlehem Steel’s operations in the Baltimore area (now occupied by Amazon operations). There is a great deal of nostalgia for working at family-owned department stores, (now history). Readers might to connect that to Amazon employment conditions today, but really, there is no connection. Macgillis doesn’t force the connection either. Times are different. Working conditions are different, and not just at Amazon warehouses. The purpose it serves in the book is never clear.
The title, Fulfillment, has many meanings in this context. Fulfilled orders, fulfilled lives, or even a fulfilled dump of the evidence condemning Amazon. But the book doesn’t fulfill any of them. At this level, it is too clever by half. It isn’t fulfilling.
The book concludes with a Baltimore drug dealer taking a job at an Amazon warehouse, because the pandemic closed the stores his customers used to steal things from. At the age of 33, this was his first real job.
The end.
David Wineberg
How Amazon takes advantage of its scale to evade legal consequences and uses regulatory capture to build on its own power is well taken, but the story sags under the weight of tiresome statistics and details (it truly does not matter to this story how palatial the Bethlehem Steel C-suite was fifty years ago) as the author takes uncountable tangential paths to his overall thesis.
Finally, the portions in the last chapter about the pandemic aid from Congress and heavily reduced airline destinations are already inaccurate, a victim of putting too much stock in the permanence of very recent events.
In short, maybe the author should issue an errata, take time to consider a broader view on how to tell the story of wealth inequality and rising corporate power, then try again with a very astute editor willing to say no.
One excellent chapter examines how Amazon contributes both to homelessness in Seattle and to the backlash to it in an ostensibly liberal city. “Seattle had become proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors. Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities.”
This has toxic effects on mobility as well—moving to a big city without a college degree means a job that doesn’t pay much more than a job in the rest of America, but lots more housing costs; this chokes off sustainable growth even in the big cities. The book makes the case for having a lot of small capitalist “greedy f*cks” rather than a few giant corporations with no interest in investing in areas outside the really big cities.