Fulfillment

Winning and Losing in One-Click America

By: Alec MacGillis

Narrated by: Danny Gavigan

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 Audio

Excellent information. Fast reading. Too fast?

Great information but the reader reads so fast and with so little inflection that honestly he makes the subject difficult to understand. Or to care about. I know it’s important but he reads it like let’s get through this and not like let’s try to glean some knowledge from it. New reader? Or just add a pause here or there JB your speech pattern. Maybe a rising and falling of vocal pitch. Something.

A cautionary tale for American.

Fulfillment is a dual edged blade. The stories of our economic imbalances are really driven home.

How we deal with it is an ongoing narrative

Great book

After reading this, I decided to stop buying anything online especially Amazon and just buy locally.

A good overview of our new reality

MacGillis uses real life case studies and real people situations to show and describe the wealth gap, tech greed and overt power takeover by tech, namely Amazon.

An eye opener

I almost wrote this book off after the first three chapters but boy am I glad I didn’t! I bought the book and opted to listen to the audiobook. It is incredibly insightful and eye opening. I have always enjoyed my Amazon experience but that experience like the millions that transact daily come at a staggering cost. This book really makes you question the road we are heading down with one click on demand shopping and it is scary.