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
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 16, 2021 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781250792372
- File size: 356266 KB
- Duration: 12:22:13
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
Journalist Alec MacGillis writes for ProPublica--a New York City-based organization that carries out investigative journalism in the public interest. Here he offers a detailed, expansive, and well-researched examination of Amazon with a special focus on its impacts on citizens of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Danny Gavigan's workmanlike narration maintains a reasonable tone. Skillfully knitted into the prose are personal stories from current and former Amazon employees offering both praise and condemnation. Listeners will likely learn much about the complex mat�riel hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses that comprise the company so many of us routinely do business with. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
December 7, 2020
ProPublica journalist MacGillis (The Cynic) delivers a probing, character-driven report on Amazon’s impact on the American economy and labor practices. His profile subjects include a worker at an Amazon warehouse in Thornton, Colo., who has moved into his basement out of fear he will contract Covid-19 and transmit it to his high-risk mother-in-law, and a family in Dayton, Ohio, living in a homeless shelter after the father lost his $12 per hour job at a company that sells 140,000 tons of cardboard annually to Amazon. Meanwhile, MacGillis points out, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s fortune increased by tens of billions due to the pandemic, and the company got millions of dollars in tax credits to open a fulfillment center near Dayton. MacGillis also accuses the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, of subjecting Amazon’s plans to open headquarters in New York City and the Washington metro area to “less scrutiny” than the New York Times did. (The company abandoned its New York plans.) MacGillis gathers copious evidence that Amazon and other tech companies have disadvantaged American workers, yet he resists sermonizing in order to let readers draw their own conclusions. This cogent and wide-ranging study sounds the alarm bells.
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Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
subjects
Languages
- English
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