How Amazon became the behemoth it was designed to be

When Jeff Bezos, cofounder of Amazon, took a rocket into outer space recently, he held a press conference and thanked “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this.” He might also have thanked resi­dents in towns and cities across the United States who have paid more for basic services such as electricity to offset Amazon’s consumption. Or the government officials who made deals behind closed doors to waive hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes (even as Amazon increased the use of public goods), accelerated the granting of building permits, and in some cases gave the company free land.

Fulfillment is long-form journalism at its best; reading the book feels like absorbing 10 or 20 years worth of well-written news articles and connecting the dots to show how the US economy got to this point. Alec MacGillis weaves together individual stories with economics, poli­tics, and geography to show how Amazon exploited existing trends while injecting its way of doing business into various local places, “throwing the whole country off-kilter.”

Despair in neglected areas led to overlapping manifestations: increasing poverty, stress on government services, and the opioid crisis. In metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, the winner-take-all economy has benefited a few at the expense of most, as MacGillis shows. “So much of the country’s growth and prosperity had been clustered in so few places,” he writes, “that people in these successful cities, too, would be better off if more of that wealth and dy­namism had spread to other cities and towns.”