Fulfillment
Winning and Losing in One-Click America
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Narrated by:
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Danny Gavigan
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Written by:
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Alec MacGillis
About this listen
2021 NPR Best Book of the Year
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 30 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’ 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, DC, 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
©2021 Alec MacGillis and Stefan Alexander MacGillis (P)2021 Macmillan AudioWhat listeners say about Fulfillment
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- M Gomes
- 2022-02-10
Irony, Fulfilled by Amazon
To listen to this book, distributed digitally, through Audible; oh, the irony. Plus three words.
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- JennLenn
- 2021-05-04
a sad tale of retail and the classes
really an important story to be told. Anyone wondering what is happening to their retail and local economies need look no further. When you know better, you do better!
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- Joseph A.
- 2023-02-03
Harsh but this is little more than a leftist screed
Little knowledge of the industry is imparted on the reader. I’m educated about some exploitive practices by Amazon but this is a sloppy critique of neoliberalism/neoconservatism dressed up as an analysis of the fulfilment industry. The title really should make some reference to Amazon too. Would not recommend. The author can’t even resist multiple rants about wealth excess. We get it.
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