Illustration by Jandos Rothstein
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
By Alec MacGillis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Jeff Bezos is unique among his cohort of robber barons. Unlike Bill Gates, he is not really given to global-health, humanitarian, or philanthropic endeavors. He was one of the only American billionaires to resist signing the Giving Pledge, a soft commitment to give away half of one’s wealth that none of its signatories have gotten anywhere near to observing thus far. Mark Zuckerberg endowed a major American hospital; Andrew Carnegie founded a prestigious American college. No one is checking in at Bezos General or enrolling at Bezos U. His ex-wife has been aggressively generous with the family fortune post-separation; Bezos himself has not.
After Henry Ford handed off the presidency of Ford Motor Company, he began work on Fordlandia, his idealized society carved out of the Amazon rain forest, drawing on his development of Dearborn, Michigan. Bezos, at a similar age and endowment and recently “retired” from Amazon, has made no such commitment. He has extraterrestrial interests, but seemingly only by process of elimination. “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,” he said in 2018.
What motivates Bezos? A Wall Streeter by trade, he moved into a house with a garage so he could claim to have started Amazon in a garage. He chose Seattle, because Washington was small, and no sales out of state would be subject to sales tax. He sold books, not because he cared about literature, but because there were a lot of them. His mission was not to deliver Eden, but to create an empire. “Right a social wrong? Are you fucking kidding me? Jeff Bezos is a straight-up libertarian,” was how early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer put it.
Amazon is the world’s fourth-most-valuable company, which drastically understates the enormity of its operation. In 2005, when the company introduced Amazon Prime and free two-day shipping, it had just three American warehouses. Now, it is responsible for 50 percent of all e-commerce. Amazon has overhauled retail, cloud computing, groceries, logistics, entertainment, newspapers, pharmaceuticals, and even doorbells. It’s the second-largest private employer in the United States, and that doesn’t count its extreme reliance on subcontractors. According to one estimate, as many as 82 percent of U.S. households have Amazon Prime, and more people use it than voted for either major-party candidate in the most recent presidential election. Which is to say: Jeff didn’t need a patch of tropical rain forest to enact his vision for society. Bezosworld is a place on Earth, and we’re living in it.
Alec MacGillis takes full stock of what exactly that world looks like in his new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Calling on a sweeping array of personal vignettes and tracing out lengthy historical through lines, MacGillis chronicles life across Amazonia through the eyes of drivers, pickers, sorters, corrugated-cardboard manufacturers, politicians, lobbyists, activists, artists, and more.
Fulfillment also tells the story of how Bezos built Bezosworld. To understand Amazon is to understand trade policy, deindustrialization, the collapse of unions, the demise of antitrust enforcement, the death of newspapers, campaign finance laws, the history of lobbying, real estate prices, regional inequality, and tax policy. Amazon, of course, is the Everything Store; is it not, too, the Everything Story? What part of America’s economy, its political climate, its empire in decline, or its spiritual injury doesn’t factor in? And if this chapter in our history is new, is it better?
FULFILLMENT BEGINS with the pseudonymed Hector Torrez moving into a basement. Torrez once made $170,000 a year doing white-collar tech work. Now he makes $15 an hour at an Amazon warehouse, moving boxes in the dead of night, physically grueling work made worse by the coronavirus. Torrez has likely been exposed repeatedly, but the company has not made any effort to inform or protect workers.
Tales of downward mobility recur repeatedly in the book. Todd Swallows, whose father ran a reasonably remunerative trucking business in Ohio, spends a decade bouncing around at low-wage jobs before finally settling in as a temp at a plant making cardboard Amazon boxes, which pays just $10 an hour, the same rate he was getting as a 17-year-old at a pizza joint. Bill Bodani Jr., a retired union worker, works a forklift at a warehouse for $12 an hour, at the very same Baltimore site he once worked for Bethlehem Steel at $35 per. We know it’s true, because we know that wages, especially for people outside of the top 10 percent of earners, haven’t budged in 40 years, when they’re not going in reverse.
Worse, Jody Rhoads, who drives a pallet mover, gets accidentally killed in a Pennsylvania warehouse. She’s not the only worker whose story in the book ends in gruesome death. Repeatedly, Amazon does not inform fellow workers, or their families, of these outcomes. Sometimes regulators help the company craft a credible, exculpatory explanation.
First- and third-person accounts of Amazon’s warehouses of horrors have become books, magazines, podcast episodes, and more. MacGillis leaves unsaid that this was not Amazon’s invention. Warehousing was low-paid, grueling, and heavily reliant on temp workers before Amazon became shorthand for the entire industry. Workers at the Walmart warehouse cluster in Will County, Illinois, are no better or worse off than their counterparts at the Amazon cluster up the road. If the company has contributed any innovation to the sector, it’s the amount of technology it has committed to surveilling employees and minimizing their bathroom breaks.
In MacGillis’s telling, where it happens is as important as what happens. The small cities of Ohio and Pennsylvania thrived under the monopolistic giants of the industrial age, manufacturing steel and iron and the products they went into. These towns have not been passed over by Amazon. But the new jobs are terrible, worse than their previous employment at long-gone manufacturers and newer firms run out of town by the Amazon machine. Rural and exurban Virginia has received data centers, which consume a lot of energy but provide no jobs at all. And even if Amazon doesn’t show up, the corralling of third-party sellers onto its platform can savage the local economy from a distance. El Paso, far from the Rust Belt, has seen its office supply sector decimated, as small-business owners are forced to pay extortionate percentages of their sales to the company, if they can manage to get their prices low enough to beat Amazon’s own submarket rates. By 2018, Amazon’s cut of third-party sales made up a fifth of its revenue.
Meanwhile, places like Seattle, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C., don’t have to store the stuff. Instead, they get to house the programmers, lobbyists, and white-collar workers who make the real decisions—and the real money. Like its goods, Amazon funnels money out of forgotten places and into the gilded urban centers of choice, helping contribute to the stunning rise in real estate prices and the cost of living. Which means that people who thought they had nothing to do with the company, like Seattle artist Milo Duke, one of the book’s closest captures, are being chased out via soaring rents, in houses lapped up as investments by well-paid white-collar workers.
The warehouse clusters have opioid addiction and pollution; the centers of capital get gentrification and platitudinous liberals. One area votes for Trump, the other for Biden. To tell all of that at once requires a wide scope, and sometimes the aperture does seem too wide (I’m not convinced that we need to know about the early career of David Rubenstein, who founded the Carlyle Group and then became president of the Economic Club of Washington, which eventually hosted Jeff Bezos for an event), but it allows us to see that this is indeed a closed loop. Amazon really is that big.
RON ADAR/SOPA IMAGES VIA AP
A rally for Amazon warehouse workers attempting to unionize. In at least five states, Amazon is one of the top employers of food-stamp recipients.
AMAZON WAS HARDLY the only company to think up selling things over the internet—we could just as easily be talking about buy.com. What set Amazon apart was its merciless arbitraging of the American tax system, novel not in its conception but in its astonishing scale.
From the outset, the company refused to levy sales tax on almost all of its website orders, giving it an insurmountable pricing advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers. The company pushed this to extremes, putting warehouses just across the border of states that had the temerity to suggest it should pay taxes, and printing business cards for employees without the company name to obscure the workers’ presence. By the time America ditched the fanciful notion that sales tax evasion equals innovation, it was 2018, when the Supreme Court mercifully compelled e-retailers to collect taxes on in-state sales via a 5-4 decision. But at that point, physical retail was already deep into its well-catalogued apocalypse. And Amazon had spent over two decades draining astonishing resources from state and local governments, which in turn became less and less capable of regulating companies like Amazon.
If only that were all. Amazon double-, triple-, and quadruple-dipped in the public purse. It engorged itself on massive government contracts, running huge data storage programs for the Pentagon and building websites to sell governments pencils and other basic items. When it came time to expand to fulfill promises like two-day shipping, Amazon demanded public subsidies for the new facilities, threatening implausibly to otherwise build them elsewhere. Soon, already enervated state and local governments were actively paying Amazon to build warehouses and data centers, situated right alongside the public roads and water pipes and power lines municipalities spend billions to create and maintain, where the company had to build and expand regardless. MacGillis chronicles these tax deals in excruciating detail. Governments arranged sundry property and payroll tax abatements, gave the company land for free, or kicked in straight-up cash. Amazon even created a secret internal target of $1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.
When a delivery route was prohibitively expensive, Amazon would simply let the publicly funded and price-controlled United States Postal Service handle it. And, of course, the federal government was already generously subsidizing the company’s rock-bottom wages. In Ohio, 1 in 10 Amazon employees is on food stamps; in at least five states, the company is one of the top employers of food-stamp recipients.
If Bezos had any particular ingenuity, it was in realizing that not only could Amazon avoid paying taxes to get a leg up over its competitors, but it could rely on witless local, state, and federal government representatives to actively grubstake the company’s growth. As a result, in 2018 Amazon contributed $0 in corporate tax on $11 billion in profit, and actually bagged a $129 million tax rebate. “[F]rom 2009 to 2018, the company paid an effective tax rate of 3 percent on profits totaling $26.5 billion,” writes MacGillis. Amazon wove a new social fabric by threading an astonishing number of loopholes in the American tax system.
And the company took that money right back to the nation’s capital in the form of lobbying. “Between 2012 and 2017, Amazon’s spending on lobbying quintupled; by 2018, it had the largest lobbying office of any tech firm in Washington,” MacGillis notes. Bezos also bought up the city’s paper of record, The Washington Post, for $250 million, and didn’t meddle prominently in its affairs or offload its staff, securing him favorable status from the city’s press corps. It was an ingenious stroke of shadow lobbying, earning implicitly favorable treatment by flattering the fourth estate.
What becomes clear, finally, is that Amazon is a creation born of failure. Failed policy on trade, labor, and competition; failed ideas on the role of government in American society; a failed press corps that didn’t meet the moment with a sense of rightful opposition. A man who loves small government built a company on the bedrock of government largesse, and now it sits as a quasi-government, taxing every economic transaction for its own corporate treasury. There’s a temptation to believe that all these economic and social forces coincided to create this situation, but they did not. Bezos did this. And we, via our elected representatives at all levels of government, assisted him. We did it to ourselves.
MacGillis’s book demonstrates that Amazon is a creation born of policy failure.
TODAY, AMAZON IS a behemoth of such incomparable size that it can treat government as a subordinate rather than a rule-setter. When New York Attorney General Letitia James announced she’d been investigating workplace safety concerns at the company’s Staten Island warehouse, they sued her in a failed attempt to stop her from bringing charges, and asked the court to force her to declare that she does not have authority to regulate workplace safety. It was a stunning act of preemption, one that announced a new era of Amazon corporate citizenry, gnashing teeth behind the smiley face logo.
Amazon’s vision synced perfectly with the pandemic. As we stay at home watching caseloads and real estate prices soar, packages pile up on the doorstep and imperiled workers take more and more life-threatening risks. Do we like living like this? Is this definitely progress? Something is clearly amiss in American society, where lifespans are plummeting and the suicide rate inches ever higher. Maybe going to the store, talking to the checkout person, and paying sales tax wasn’t so bad.
What, then, can be done? Directing enough resources to aggressively enforce workplace safety standards would be a good start. A resurrection of organized labor would make a big difference, which is why Amazon has so fiercely opposed union drives. Some semblance of an antitrust regime would certainly go a long way. We could spin off Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing arm that has become so profitable that it helped underwrite the rest of the business. (And gave it a deeply anticompetitive advantage. When companies come to AWS, Amazon knows they’re growing; if it’s a rival, Amazon can act accordingly.)
But with an empire built and sustained by public money, reliant on public infrastructure, and altogether imbricated in American life, it’s time to think seriously about one of the most forbidding words in American political discourse: nationalization. Amazon has worked hard to position itself as a public utility—think about how it has petitioned to facilitate the vaccine rollout. Why shouldn’t we treat it as we would any other?
Essential public infrastructure is very much the ambition Bezos had from the outset. That, presumably, and getting rich. With the latter entirely secured, it’s time for the rest of us to reclaim the giant we’ve unwittingly bred.
