num_pages: 400
description: A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA grounded and expansive examination of the American economic divide . . . It takes a skillful journalist to weave data and anecdotes together so effectively. Carolyn Kellogg Los Angeles TimesAn award-winning journalist investigates Amazons 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 Americaand as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping its sway will only intensify.Alec MacGilliss Fulfillment is not another inside account or expos of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that companys growing shadow. As MacGillis shows Amazons 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 whove 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 Amazons 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 readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezoss lavish Kalorama mansion.With empathy and breadth MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequalitynot the growing gap between rich and poor but the gap between the countrys 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.
language: English
title: Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux