Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis

Fulfilment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
By Alec MacGillis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

The sheer speed and extent of Amazon’s grip on the world was already terrifying before the COVID-19 pandemic came along and intensified it immeasurably, and in the nature of so many 21st century calamities, the terror is a deeply implicating thing: quarantined away from work and social life and normal errands for months on end, millions of people have availed themselves of the ease and ubiquity of Amazon’s easy shopping, even while many of them have felt a vague distaste at hitting that familiar “Buy Now” button. 

As Alec MacGillis writes in his heartfelt new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, the situation was already dire long before the pandemic. “Between 2011 and 2016, e-commerce business doubled to $350 billion,” he notes. “It had shot from 1 percent of all retail sales at the turn of the millennium to 17 percent, excluding cars and gas.” Since then, the numbers have continued to steer straight north, with Amazon’s numbers rapidly shading into science fiction dystopian levels:

When Amazon had debuted its Prime service in 2005 - free two-day shipping for $79 per year - it had fewer than ten warehouses scattered around the country. By 2017, it was up to more than a hundred warehouses nationwide. It needed more capacity because it was now handling about 40 percent of all e-commerce sales in the country, which was double its next nine rivals combined. 

All of this activity - and it’s only increased exponentially in the intervening years - is in service to something called “the flywheel,” which MacGillis describes with neat economy as “how convenience and low prices drew customers, which drove traffic, which drew more sellers and products, which drove yet more traffic and sales.” Millions of consumers, including many more who’ve been conditioned by a solid year of pandemic to accustom themselves to like online shopping of all kinds, keep that flywheel spinning - and any of those consumers who read Fulfillment will receive a sharp reminder that they virtually never even think about the price society at large is paying for the flywheel. 

As MacGillis makes clear, that price is catastrophically high. Amazon, for instance, is synonymous with destroying rather than simply besting its competitors; its employment practices are draconian; its government lobbying is as deep-pocketed as that of many whole countries; its “fulfillment centers” are blights on the communities where they appear. One of the many people MacGillis interviews for this book describes the arrival of such a warehouse in Virginia in memorably chilling terms:

“It’s like having a White House in the neighborhood. There’s no penetration, no information, no nothing … You have a building there, you don’t know who’s coming, you don’t know who’s going. You don’t know what’s going on … You don’t know if it’s on, you don’t know if it’s off. You don’t know nothing. You see no benefits of it. They’ve done nothing for my taxes, they’ve done nothing for the road infrastructure. They carved it out and they’re making money.”

It’s unlikely that Fulfillment will change behaviors. This must be squarely faced. Most people, presented with the option of shopping for literally anything in the world from the comfort of their living room couch and having it seamlessly delivered to their doorstep the next day, will not forsake that mind-boggling convenience for any reason. 

But if Fulfillment makes even a few thousand of those consumers more mindful, if it prompts even a few thousand of them to remember that they have shops over on their Main Street that badly need their support and will greet them with smiles rather than an Amazon van dashing away in the dead of night, well, that will be a kind of victory. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.