Fulfillment

Filed under my new “What's Wrong with America?” shelf. Disturbing and depressing look at how Amazon is contributing to the economic decline of towns and small cities while making large cities unaffordable to all but the wealthy. The larger Amazon gets, the more it can bully local, state, and federal governments into giving it huge tax breaks and looking the other way as Jeff Bezos and Co. ignore health and safety regulations, force small businesses to use their Marketplace platform, and squash any attempts at unionizing.

All of this was before COVID-19 came along and accelerated everything, as Amazon became the sole source of most items for people stuck at home, and the dominant employer for those who lost their jobs. And the income/wealth gap in our country continues to grow...

Numerous “victims” of Amazon's growth are profiled, but the saddest one to me was the Baby Boomer who had worked most of his life in Baltimore's steel industry, only to see the factories torn down and replaced by Amazon warehouses, where he now earns a fraction of his former salary and can't even take bathroom breaks without being written up for lack of productivity.

After reading the book, you may decide to boycott Amazon products, but you can't possibly avoid Amazon Web Services, whose cloud servers host many of the most commonly used websites. So what can you do to fight back? Unfortunately MacGillis doesn't provide any potential solutions, only a bleak vision of a monopoly/monopsony (look it up) run by the richest man on the planet.

Amazon's Long Shadow. This book seeks to show the America that was, and the America that is in the Age of Amazon and how the former became the latter. And in that goal, it actually does remarkably well. Sprinkling case study after case study after case study with history, political science, and social science, this book truly does a remarkable job of showing the changing reality of living and working in an America that has gone from hyper local business to one of hyper global - and the giant blue smiley swoosh that has accompanied much of this transition over the last 2o years in particular. Very much a literary style work, this perhaps won't work for those looking for a more in-depth attack on Amazon, nor will it really work for those looking for a true in-depth look at Amazon's specific practices. But it does serve as a solid work of showing many of Amazon's overall tactics and how they are both the result of change and the precipice of other change. Very much recommended.