You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
143 reviews for:
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Alec MacGillis, Stefan Alexander MacGillis
3.9 AVERAGE
143 reviews for:
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Alec MacGillis, Stefan Alexander MacGillis
3.9 AVERAGE
I tried to really *read* this book but found it just went all over the place.
This book has a really impressive scope. Using Amazon's rise as a window, Alec MacGillis unfurls a narrative of regional inequality in America. How do some places get rich? And others poorer? This is a story of how capital is value in motion. It flows around the country in different ways from de-industrialized rust belts to gleaming hyper-unequal cities. Money seeps its away into the cracks of American society — into the divides of race, class, union vs. non-union, big business vs. small — and just as it enters, it leaves, eroding the social fabric and widening the gulfs.
The mistake in reading this book is thinking it's just about Amazon. It's about the multiple Amazons that have risen and fallen in America's 20th century. Bethlehem Steel for America's industrial age. It's about the Carlyle Group and the private equity raids. It's about the endless competition of who can be the most ruthless observers of our economic system and then exploit it. And then the rest of us are caught in the toss and turn.
The mistake in reading this book is thinking it's just about Amazon. It's about the multiple Amazons that have risen and fallen in America's 20th century. Bethlehem Steel for America's industrial age. It's about the Carlyle Group and the private equity raids. It's about the endless competition of who can be the most ruthless observers of our economic system and then exploit it. And then the rest of us are caught in the toss and turn.
informative
slow-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
Not an easy read - each chapter uses a multi-character case study, weaving several seeming disparate characters together, and it becomes hard to keep track them of them all through the book (some reappear, many don't). Utlimately depressing, but very necessary reading - and I will try to avoid buying anything from Amazon ever again.
challenging
informative
fast-paced
Important read on the role of Amazon in defining American urban life. Wish there was more on the different facets of Amazon’s business, and more regular connection between Amazon practices and other corporate giants.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Car accident, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Addiction, Suicide
3.5 stars. Tons of fascinating and damning facts about how Amazon operates, mixed with stories of people and communities affected by the rise of e-commerce and the fall of local business. I want people to read this, but also felt like it was hard to follow at times, jumping between times and places and people, and the Amazon story wasn’t always woven well with the others. It felt more like MacGillis had two different stories he wanted to tell in one book and couldn’t smoothly connect them.
Fascinating and depressing. Not really a history of Bezos or Amazon, but more a dissection of how Amazon changed the country.
MacGillis really looks at this problem from both directions. It examines how Amazon set its eyes on politics and began heavily leveraging their economic power to hold cities hostage, demand cities exploit themselves for Amazon's benefit, and how Bezos has strategically set himself and Amazon up to rub shoulders with political elites.
The other side of this is the way capital has become centralized in a few cities to the collapse of the rest of America. MacGillis tells the story of a lot of different people living in many American cities that have begun to collapse economically and empty out.
But, yeah, this is a great book about our changing political and economic landscape.
MacGillis really looks at this problem from both directions. It examines how Amazon set its eyes on politics and began heavily leveraging their economic power to hold cities hostage, demand cities exploit themselves for Amazon's benefit, and how Bezos has strategically set himself and Amazon up to rub shoulders with political elites.
The other side of this is the way capital has become centralized in a few cities to the collapse of the rest of America. MacGillis tells the story of a lot of different people living in many American cities that have begun to collapse economically and empty out.
But, yeah, this is a great book about our changing political and economic landscape.
What an unmitigated mess of a book. It’s a shame that MacGillis is actually a skilled and engaging author, because he’s written a volume that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
There are MANY issues here, but the main one is that MacGillis refuses to make an argument. Is Amazon bad? He won’t tell you! Instead we get anecdote after anecdote of “here’s something bad that happened, and Amazon was kinda-sorta-maybe involved.” One such story is about a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse, killing two employees. Tragic? Absolutely. Amazon’s fault? No. Jeff Bezos doesn’t control the weather (yet). This book is for people who have already made up their mind that Amazon is bad — very bad — and want to masturbate alongside MacGillis for 340 pages.
Setting ALL that aside, this book also unfortunately reflects MacGillis’ horribly misguided worldview. He yearns for the industrial-manufacturing economy of yore because… I’m not sure, exactly. He has a fetish for small towns, or something. Never mind that America is far more prosperous and a far better place to live than it was 50 or 100 years ago. He also continually undercuts his argument about a “winner-take-all” economy by featuring the *many* winners. If things were really winner-take-all, why would Columbus, OH be doing well? If it’s not because they built a bunch of little factories, MacGillis doesn’t care. And he avoids ANY discussion of the benefits of urbanization and agglomeration, of which there are many!
Finally, I’ll point out that MacGillis is VERY loose with the facts (an interesting trait for a senior ProPublica reporter… hmm…). I can’t say that anything is outright wrong, but he is deliberately misleading with much of the information presented in the book, mostly in the service of disparaging urban-dwellers.
In conclusion: don’t read this book. Do some online shopping (on Amazon!) instead.
There are MANY issues here, but the main one is that MacGillis refuses to make an argument. Is Amazon bad? He won’t tell you! Instead we get anecdote after anecdote of “here’s something bad that happened, and Amazon was kinda-sorta-maybe involved.” One such story is about a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse, killing two employees. Tragic? Absolutely. Amazon’s fault? No. Jeff Bezos doesn’t control the weather (yet). This book is for people who have already made up their mind that Amazon is bad — very bad — and want to masturbate alongside MacGillis for 340 pages.
Setting ALL that aside, this book also unfortunately reflects MacGillis’ horribly misguided worldview. He yearns for the industrial-manufacturing economy of yore because… I’m not sure, exactly. He has a fetish for small towns, or something. Never mind that America is far more prosperous and a far better place to live than it was 50 or 100 years ago. He also continually undercuts his argument about a “winner-take-all” economy by featuring the *many* winners. If things were really winner-take-all, why would Columbus, OH be doing well? If it’s not because they built a bunch of little factories, MacGillis doesn’t care. And he avoids ANY discussion of the benefits of urbanization and agglomeration, of which there are many!
Finally, I’ll point out that MacGillis is VERY loose with the facts (an interesting trait for a senior ProPublica reporter… hmm…). I can’t say that anything is outright wrong, but he is deliberately misleading with much of the information presented in the book, mostly in the service of disparaging urban-dwellers.
In conclusion: don’t read this book. Do some online shopping (on Amazon!) instead.
informative
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced