Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis
Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis
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Fulfillment
Winning and Losing in One-Click America

Author: Alec MacGillis

Narrator: Danny Gavigan

Unabridged: 12 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/16/2021


Synopsis

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

About Alec MacGillis

Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica and the recipient of the George Polk Award, the Robin Toner prize, and other honors. He worked previously at The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other publications. His ProPublica reporting on Dayton, Ohio was the basis of a PBS Frontline documentary about the city. He is the author of The Cynic, a 2014 biography of Mitch McConnell. He lives in Baltimore.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David on November 05, 2020

Amazon is a monster, if only just in size. There are numerous books and papers examining its labor practices, union bashing, seller abuses, platform monopoly tactics, and its effects on all other retail. Alec Macgillis’ book Fulfillment is different. It follows the lives of a handful of Americans, m......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on November 25, 2020

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 soci......more

Goodreads review by Els Book Hunters on May 05, 2022

Amazon és aquella botiga virtual en la que hi busqueu qualsevol cosa i ho tenen, no cal comprar enlloc més. Bé, també us ofereix una plataforma de continguts audiovisuals. Ah, i el llibre electrònic més popular, amb títols infinits. I és clar, si us cal espai al núvol, també us en venen. Heu mirat a......more

Goodreads review by David on April 03, 2021

I've probably read most of Alec MacGillis' work for the past decade, and much of what's here feels familiar, with the Amazon throughline layered on. In a way the book is a victim of the author's success - his deep reporting in Baltimore and Dayton was already known to me. The uninitiated reader will......more

Goodreads review by Michael on May 26, 2021

I was surprised when I saw the many so-so or negative reviews of this book. I was even more surprised by the number of people who seem to think that this is a book about Amazon. I looked at it differently. I viewed it as an examination of the profound changes in the US economy over the last 40 years......more


Awards

  • NPR Best Book of the Year