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Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis, Stefan Alexander MacGillis
trippalli's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.75
Very informative. Amazing all the evil and manipulative things Amazon did to force small businesses to join them even losing money and often going out of business, and how they used those partners to skimtactics and what to sell from subject matter experts then sold the same thing over promoting their version of the item. And on and on... So many injuries and deaths at Amazon warehouses too. Terrifying.
The last sentence confused me a bit..a guy quits dealing illegal drugs and takes an Amazon job instead. Is it a comparison. Ironic, or something else?
Immensely informative but a bit dark, with good reason.
The last sentence confused me a bit..a guy quits dealing illegal drugs and takes an Amazon job instead. Is it a comparison. Ironic, or something else?
Immensely informative but a bit dark, with good reason.
alexisrt's review against another edition
5.0
As the title and cover indicate, Fulfillment is about Amazon--but only partly. It's about the overall changes in the US economy, its winners and losers, and the prices we've paid.
MacGillis' basic thesis is fairly simple: deindustrialization, offshoring, and industry consolidation has created an economically polarized America, where a few cities have outsized success while many smaller ones lag behind. He delves in particular into Baltimore, which has suffered major economic and social dislocation, and Seattle, which has gone from being a provincial city to a wealthy tech powerhouse. The winning cities price out all but the wealthiest residents, leading to angry arguments about who "deserves" to live there. The losers don't have high paying jobs, and residents cannot afford to move. (Mobility in the US has decreased in recent decades, which lends support to MacGillis' narrative.)
In MacGillis' telling, no one is really off the hook, which I appreciated. There's a particular tendency these days to hew to Other People Are the Problem, and he doesn't do that. In Baltimore, Bethlehem Steel management was largely to blame for the failure of Sparrows Point (contrary to a popular narrative that it was about lazy unions), but unions were not blameless. Politicians across the political spectrum fail voters and workers with their competition to offer tax incentives to large corporations. Everyone's afraid to stop because other states and municipalities won't, but the end result is enormous subsidies to the corporations who need it least.
There's certainly a great deal more to say--MacGillis is really interested in the personal stories behind change, and they do take up a fair bit of the book. There's a lot more he could have added to flesh out the story behind the story--more business type reporting, antitrust, mergers, offshoring. I do feel that these stories had a larger point, though, which is to show the scope of economic change. When a factory closes, you don't just lose 500 jobs. Those 500 workers no longer have money to spend, and it ripples outwards. When local businesses are killed, it doesn't just affect them. When local department stores shutter, we spend our money online, taking money out of the community--and making our smaller towns and cities less attractive places to live. (The story of the Bon-Ton would have hooked in well to how Macy's has become the only major department store chain in much of the US.)
Progressives aren't off the hook. Seattle residents fell prey to Amazon's narrative about taxes and homelessness, and repealed a tax to pay for homeless services. Washington state is one of only 8 without an income tax, relying instead on regressive taxation, which lawmakers have admitted they won't change because of tech. The urban progressives on the ascent in the Democratic Party have also hurt their own cause by clustering in bubbles and dismissing small town and rural voters. (As a small-city Democrat, I've rarely encountered people as self-satisfied as the urban progressive.)
I'm really not fond of "economic anxiety caused Trump" narratives, which always have to do a dance around the immediate reasons many people voted for Trump. Thankfully MacGillis doesn't fall into the same traps as much of the news media. Instead, he suggests, economic changes created fertile territory for Trumpism, rather than a simple link. I found this a much more satisfying narrative: rather than simply suggesting people became more conservative because they thought it would improve things, it allows for a place where economic conditions leave people open to cultural explanations and anger.
As for the Amazon workers? Well some of them die. Two of the cases MacGillis covers were just down the road from me in Carlisle. And it mostly seems Amazon considers this the cost of business.
MacGillis' basic thesis is fairly simple: deindustrialization, offshoring, and industry consolidation has created an economically polarized America, where a few cities have outsized success while many smaller ones lag behind. He delves in particular into Baltimore, which has suffered major economic and social dislocation, and Seattle, which has gone from being a provincial city to a wealthy tech powerhouse. The winning cities price out all but the wealthiest residents, leading to angry arguments about who "deserves" to live there. The losers don't have high paying jobs, and residents cannot afford to move. (Mobility in the US has decreased in recent decades, which lends support to MacGillis' narrative.)
In MacGillis' telling, no one is really off the hook, which I appreciated. There's a particular tendency these days to hew to Other People Are the Problem, and he doesn't do that. In Baltimore, Bethlehem Steel management was largely to blame for the failure of Sparrows Point (contrary to a popular narrative that it was about lazy unions), but unions were not blameless. Politicians across the political spectrum fail voters and workers with their competition to offer tax incentives to large corporations. Everyone's afraid to stop because other states and municipalities won't, but the end result is enormous subsidies to the corporations who need it least.
There's certainly a great deal more to say--MacGillis is really interested in the personal stories behind change, and they do take up a fair bit of the book. There's a lot more he could have added to flesh out the story behind the story--more business type reporting, antitrust, mergers, offshoring. I do feel that these stories had a larger point, though, which is to show the scope of economic change. When a factory closes, you don't just lose 500 jobs. Those 500 workers no longer have money to spend, and it ripples outwards. When local businesses are killed, it doesn't just affect them. When local department stores shutter, we spend our money online, taking money out of the community--and making our smaller towns and cities less attractive places to live. (The story of the Bon-Ton would have hooked in well to how Macy's has become the only major department store chain in much of the US.)
Progressives aren't off the hook. Seattle residents fell prey to Amazon's narrative about taxes and homelessness, and repealed a tax to pay for homeless services. Washington state is one of only 8 without an income tax, relying instead on regressive taxation, which lawmakers have admitted they won't change because of tech. The urban progressives on the ascent in the Democratic Party have also hurt their own cause by clustering in bubbles and dismissing small town and rural voters. (As a small-city Democrat, I've rarely encountered people as self-satisfied as the urban progressive.)
I'm really not fond of "economic anxiety caused Trump" narratives, which always have to do a dance around the immediate reasons many people voted for Trump. Thankfully MacGillis doesn't fall into the same traps as much of the news media. Instead, he suggests, economic changes created fertile territory for Trumpism, rather than a simple link. I found this a much more satisfying narrative: rather than simply suggesting people became more conservative because they thought it would improve things, it allows for a place where economic conditions leave people open to cultural explanations and anger.
As for the Amazon workers? Well some of them die. Two of the cases MacGillis covers were just down the road from me in Carlisle. And it mostly seems Amazon considers this the cost of business.
sara_shocks's review against another edition
4.0
Really thorough examination of how Amazon embodies and exacerbates late-stage capitalism
sjgrodsky's review against another edition
3.0
The author is excellent at citing the revealing, often surprising statistics. He finds interesting personalities and tells their stories, in sometimes too-great detail.
He certainly is right when he says that the US has bifurcated in the last 30 years, into comfortable, well educated big cities, where optimism is justified, and rusting smaller towns and rural areas, where the only growth industry is deaths of despair.
What the author doesn’t do is give you a real idea of what it’s like to work for Amazon. And you don’t get any insight into the makeup of the Amazon workforce: what percent is warehouse, what portion marketing, what portion software? Is it a good environment for women? Does it promote from within? Does it offer educational benefits in a useful way? Are the warehouses worse than other warehouses? How do the white collar jobs compare to other white collar jobs?
I also think that somewhere, at some point, the author could have recognized two points:
1
—
Amazon virtually invented e-commerce. Jeff Bezos saw the potential of the internet and built a business around it. Millions of other people COULD have done that. But Bezos was the one who did.
2
—
Amazon has cleverly extended its business because it realized that the web services built for internal use could be monetized by offering them to thousands of other businesses. It’s sort of like Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line, helping you to adapt that concept to your business — for a price.
As a Washingtonian, I found his grasp of my hometown to be .... shaky. For example, he writes (page 68) that contractors were entrusted “to oversee [federal] programs, in exchange for a healthy cut off the top.”
Huh? What does he mean by “cut off the top”? Does he mean that contractors are engaged in corruption? Does he mean that they pocket fees they are entrusted to collect? Contracts often pay generously, but that’s not “taking a cut off the top.”
I think he doesn’t know what he means to say, so typed this often-used phrase as a way of ending a run-on sentence.
The author also gets it REALLY wrong when he writes that Baltimore and Washington “shared” a baseball team.
Baseballs-starved Washingtonians journeyed to Camden Yards and did their best to root sincerely for the Orioles. Until, what a relief, we got the Nats. A team worth waiting for.
He certainly is right when he says that the US has bifurcated in the last 30 years, into comfortable, well educated big cities, where optimism is justified, and rusting smaller towns and rural areas, where the only growth industry is deaths of despair.
What the author doesn’t do is give you a real idea of what it’s like to work for Amazon. And you don’t get any insight into the makeup of the Amazon workforce: what percent is warehouse, what portion marketing, what portion software? Is it a good environment for women? Does it promote from within? Does it offer educational benefits in a useful way? Are the warehouses worse than other warehouses? How do the white collar jobs compare to other white collar jobs?
I also think that somewhere, at some point, the author could have recognized two points:
1
—
Amazon virtually invented e-commerce. Jeff Bezos saw the potential of the internet and built a business around it. Millions of other people COULD have done that. But Bezos was the one who did.
2
—
Amazon has cleverly extended its business because it realized that the web services built for internal use could be monetized by offering them to thousands of other businesses. It’s sort of like Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line, helping you to adapt that concept to your business — for a price.
As a Washingtonian, I found his grasp of my hometown to be .... shaky. For example, he writes (page 68) that contractors were entrusted “to oversee [federal] programs, in exchange for a healthy cut off the top.”
Huh? What does he mean by “cut off the top”? Does he mean that contractors are engaged in corruption? Does he mean that they pocket fees they are entrusted to collect? Contracts often pay generously, but that’s not “taking a cut off the top.”
I think he doesn’t know what he means to say, so typed this often-used phrase as a way of ending a run-on sentence.
The author also gets it REALLY wrong when he writes that Baltimore and Washington “shared” a baseball team.
Baseballs-starved Washingtonians journeyed to Camden Yards and did their best to root sincerely for the Orioles. Until, what a relief, we got the Nats. A team worth waiting for.
hannah_klaassen's review against another edition
4.0
Can we all agree to shop local and cancel our Amazon Prime subscriptions?
lyonsmw's review against another edition
4.0
Sobering. That one word describes this book and the America that Alec MacGillis has captured with Amazon looking everywhere. I’ve read several books about Amazon and its impact on the United States. This one is the most arresting. MacGillis expertly weaves stories of people into the Amazon effect. It’s a very compelling read.
joeynedland's review against another edition
3.0
I think that there’s good content to write to better understand Amazon’s impact on our economy and society writ large, but MacGillis’s way of telling that story doesn’t necessarily take the most effective angle. He anchors the story through personal stories, weaving in biographies of many whose lives have been negatively affected by Amazon in some way, along with detailed histories of industry in select areas (Ohio, Baltimore). I think that it relies a bit too heavily on these anecdotes, and the throughlines are muddled at points, which I found somewhat frustrating. Still, a useful book to read to understand just how many people have been active champions of the detrimental rise of Amazon to the point of monopoly.
eznark's review against another edition
2.0
Alec MacGillis Fulfillment is sort of an embarrassing mess. “Here’s a half dozen people who have had rough lives and dozens of jobs, one of which happened to be at Amazon.” He then blames Amazon. It’s a mess. A really disappointing mess because I have like 30,000 Amazon employees within an hour radius and there is a really good and interesting book here but this isn’t it.
martacava's review against another edition
Això no és un llibre sobre Amazon. Això és un llibre sobre les conseqüències, directes o indirectes, d'aquesta empresa milionària als barris, als carrers, a les famílies, als seus treballadors en nòmina, als subcontractats, al trànsit de les ciutats i a tot allò que ens envolta. Ells es queden els milions de beneficis i la resta del món, patim les conseqüències de la seva riquesa.