Fulfillment
About This Book
Nearly a century ago, the writer and activist Upton Sinclair turned his attention to Ford, a carmaker then valued at about a billion dollars, in a 1937 novel subtitled A Story of Ford-America. He condemned a firm that paid its workers poorly and made them perform monotonous, often perilous work on the assembly line. Today Amazon's market value has climbed past a trillion dollars, while Ford's is around thirty billion. Americans are buying more online than ever, and the pandemic has pushed that habit further, so the company's reach is likely to keep growing. Alec MacGillis does not set out to produce another insider story or muckraking expose of Amazon. Instead, he examines the country that lies in the shadow of the company's expansion. Amazon's far-flung complex of delivery centers, data facilities, and corporate headquarters, he argues, reflects a nation in which some cities and regions pull further ahead while others fall behind, community life frays, and jobs grow more mechanical and lonely. MacGillis travels widely to meet people who have prospered in this shifting economy and people who have struggled to keep up. In Seattle, well-paid employees filling new office towers push out a long-established Black neighborhood. In the Virginia suburbs, residents organize against the environmental effects of a proposed data center. In El Paso, small office supply businesses face a fight to hold on to government purchasing as Amazon moves in, and in Baltimore a warehouse takes the place of a legendary steel mill. The book also follows Amazon's growing sway in Washington, where officials, lobbyists, and government contractors move back and forth between public service and the company, and it visits the lavish Kalorama home of CEO Jeff Bezos. Written with compassion and a wide view, the book shows the human toll of the divide between thriving and declining regions, which MacGillis presents as a gap at least as consequential as the one between rich and poor. The result is an intimate portrait of modern capitalism, with its appetite for innovation, its dark and merciless allure, and the way it reshapes America with each purchase.
ISBN: 9780374159276
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