In a Denver suburb, Hector Torrez’s wife relegates him to the basement because of fears that he could bring home the coronavirus from his 12-hour shifts at an Amazon warehouse he learns about infected colleagues not from the company but from other workers. MacGillis introduces us to those struggling to get by in the new dispensation.
#ONE CLICK FREE#
Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store” (2013) still stands as an in-depth (and irreverent) history of Amazon Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland” (2017) and Emily Guendelsberger’s “On the Clock” (2019) offer more detail about the actual experience of working in one of the company’s cavernous warehouses - or “fulfillment centers,” in Amazon’s preferred parlance, where employees can walk up to 15 miles during a single shift and vending machines dispense free painkillers.Īlec MacGillis, whose new book is “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.” Credit. There’s little here about the company that’s new. If you’re looking for a book that parses the inner workings of Amazon, “Fulfillment” isn’t it. The immensely profitable Amazon Web Services orchestrates online life too, running much of the cloud - another realm transformed by the pandemic from convenience to necessity. MacGillis says that Amazon’s fortunes have soared during the pandemic, when “the mode of consumption it had pioneered for a quarter century had transformed from a matter of convenience to one of necessity.” In the first 10 months of last year, the company added more than 425,000 nonseasonal employees, bringing its total to 800,000 in the United States and 1.2 million worldwide. But what happens when the story you’re trying to build is subject to forces that aren’t under your control? Surveying the debates over widening inequality, MacGillis notes their tendency to focus on individual income, “rather than on the landscape of inequality across the country” - and that landscape, he says, is increasingly shaped, sorted and even governed by Amazon. In “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America,” the journalist Alec MacGillis describes a tent in Arlington, Va., the site of Amazon’s second headquarters, where job applicants submitting their résumés could see this quote from Bezos emblazoned on one of the walls. (Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” helped him to develop his personal “regret-minimization framework.”) The storytelling he exalts is purely functional, a seamless amalgam of his engineering training and his libertarian inclinations: “Build yourself a great story.”
Bezos started out by selling books not out of any literary affection but because they were a useful commodity, the kind that could give a fledgling online marketplace a competitive edge. Not necessarily the ones contained in books - those items that propelled Amazon’s rise from its beginnings in a Seattle garage in 1994 to the global behemoth it is today. To hear him tell it, Jeff Bezos loves stories.
0 kommentar(er)
