San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Assessing the impact of Amazon
I often think about the habits I perpetrate that stand in contradiction to my values yet I find myself unable to shake.
I eat meat when I adore animals; I’m addicted to the dopamine rush of social media yet hate how it hijacks my brain; I rely on Amazon when I know full well the havoc it wreaks. After reading investigative journalist Alec MacGillis’ “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in OneClick America,” I have to promote my Amazon dependence into the top problematic slot.
MacGillis argues that Amazon is the lens through which to understand the growing gulf between rich and poor in this country: “There was the extreme wealth inequality encapsulated by its founder’s outlandish personal fortune and the modest wages of the vast preponderance of its employees. There was the nature of the work most of them engaged in: rudimentary and isolating, out on the edge of town, often with unreliable hours and schedules … it had recast daily life at its most elemental level.”
“Fulfillment” is a mindbogglingly thorough book, a hybrid of urban history, reportage,
profile and research on people and places that have been impacted by the retail behemoth. MacGillis introduces us to Todd, an Ohio man emblematic of the despondent white working class whose job prospects have been foreclosed. Todd finds himself underemployed in a cardboard factory to supply the ubiquitous Prime boxes. He lives in a homeless shelter that used to be a jail.
We meet El Paso, Texas, office supply salespeople who, essentially forced to sell on Amazon to secure local contracts, incur a 15% service fee from the platform, their entire profit margin. We meet Bo, 69 years old, who drives a forklift in an Amazon warehouse, making onethird of the salary he made 20 years earlier, when the same warehouse was home to Bethlehem Steel, a union shop. His pay is often docked for “time off task,” Amazonspeak for using the bathroom.
MacGillis is equally adept in animating the economic picture. “The company’s approach to tax avoidance was a veritable Swiss Army knife, with an implement to wield against every possible government tab,” the author writes. Amazon has funneled profits through Luxembourg and avoided paying the U.S. government $1.5 billion. That stat comes courtesy of the IRS, so it’s not as if the auditors are unaware. The company uses local resources, like emergency medical services and fire departments, but does so essentially for free, because states exempt the company from paying property taxes.
When Amazon created a second headquarters in Arlington, Va., in an already prohibitively expensive housing market, they made a $3 million donation toward affordable housing and then stated that it was up to government to provide solutions, not private citizens and corporations. As MacGillis astutely notes, “Left unmentioned was that government at all levels had become less able to carry out its functions as a result of the tax avoidances the company had perfected.” And that vaunted $15 minimum wage hike? Hundreds of thousands of delivery contractors were left out of the raise.
The author contrasts the sepiatoned pasts of Sparrows Point, Md., and Seattle with a present in which an Amazon boot print has transformed each city. When these places were more affordable, when there were wellpaying jobs to be had, community and opportunity flourished. These sections of the book, while richly detailed and researched, feel overwrought and overly long at times, as if embroidered from a different project.
“Fulfillment” is a compendium of tragedies large and small. I found myself craving solutions for divestment. One hopeful moment comes at the end, when in 2019, the U.S. government finally held an antitrust hearing. The company has since turned record profits. But MacGillis’ project is to show, not to solve. Since we, as consumers (and hypocrites like me), engage in this problem, it is up to us — along with legislators — to solve it.