The pandemic has been good for Amazon. In the first ten months of 2020, the company hired 425,000 new employees (more than doubling its US workforce) and added another 500,000 independently contracted drivers. Net sales last year (almost $400 billion) were up 40 percent from 2019 and net income ($21.3 billion) nearly doubled. The already grotesque wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ballooned another 60 percent to $177 billion. And, adding insult to opulence, the company beat back a high-profile unionization drive at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama — ensuring that Amazon’s workers would continue to shoulder the burden of the company’s dramatic growth while sharing little of the reward.

Alec MacGillis touches on Amazon’s banner year in the last chapter of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, but his field of vision is much wider. Fulfillment is less about Amazon than it is about what Amazon represents and what it has wrought. For MacGillis, a reporter at ProPublica, Amazon embodies a business model based on ruthless exploitation of workers, predatory elimination of competitors, and methodical plunder of public goods. In this account, Amazon is both a symptom and a cause, offering “an ideal frame for understanding the country and what the country [is] becoming, given how many contemporary forces it represent[s] and help[s] explain.”

Fulfillment is a reporter’s book, told largely through personal stories that underscore the stark contrasts between those people and places that “one-click America” enriches and those it leaves behind. Early chapters give us Amazon’s booming Seattle headquarters and hollowed out Dayton, Ohio, where remnants of the Rust Belt working class stencil smiles on Amazon boxes for $12 an hour. Another takes us to Washington DC, following Bezos as he purchases political influence, the Washington Post, and a 191-room mansion. Another offers an additional parable of deindustrialization, told through the history of Baltimore’s Sparrows Point steelworks; shuttered in 2012, Sparrows Point is now an Amazon fulfillment center where former steelworkers drive forklifts for barely a third of their former paychecks.