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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly.
Over the last two years, I've purchased hundreds, maybe thousands of things on Amazon. What they excel at is getting an object from a creator to a consumer as flawlessly as they can and as quickly as they can. Paper towels, toilet paper, hand soap, Tupperware, shampoo, hypoallergenic detergent, allergenic detergent, vitamins, old books, new books, an Instapot that we've never used, huge quantities of diet dog food, reusable water bottles that I somehow keep losing, KN95 masks that are probably fake.
They're watching what's going on on an hourly basis globally. Amazon can now borrow money for less than the cost of what China can borrow money. As a result, they're able to throw up more stuff against the wall than any other firms. We have a very distinctive approach that we have been honing and refining and thinking about for 22 years. At the very top of the list is customer obsession. I think a millennia from now, people are going to look back and say, wow,
Increasingly, one class of Americans has gotten used to things that they order on the internet magically arriving at their house within days, sometimes hours. And not just from Amazon. From DoorDash and Uber. Postmates. Seamless. TaskRabbit. I could go on.
while the other half of the country are the people doing the delivering. They're the ones wearing the masks and the gloves while others get to laugh at the restaurant with their friends. They're the ones delivering the takeout in the rain. They're the ones packing up the cardboard boxes of stuff. At this point, one group generally gets to show their faces. The other still does not. And this is just the beginning.
On today's episode, I continue my conversation with Alec McGillis about the cost of our COVID-19 response. In the first part, we talked about children and crime. Today, we look at how the pandemic led to the greatest upward wealth transfer in modern history. Alec's most recent book is called Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and it tells the stories of the communities and people who have been left behind. We talk about how Democrats became such a big part of what he calls the Amazon Coalition.
about the different and separate realities that the new have-and-have-nots live within, and the impact that our stubbornness and our insistence on doubling down on short-sighted policies that exacerbated all of these divisions are having and will have on the future of the country. Stay with us.
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Alec, your recent book, Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One-Click America,
You make the argument in that book that the division that we were already experiencing in this country between the have and have nots, between what you call the winner take all places and the left behind places, between, and this is your phrase and I thought it was beautiful, one world racked with painkillers and the other tainted by elite college admission schemes, is being supercharged by Amazon, which has played a kind of outsized role in this zero-sum sorting.
And I want to get into how the pandemic has sort of sped up this process in ways that might have seemed unimaginable just a decade ago. But before we do that, I'd love you to start with a story. Can you tell me about Todd Swallows, who makes cardboard in Dayton, Ohio? I'd be glad to. I mean, that's a good place to start because the book actually started with Todd. My chapter on Dayton, Ohio was what I wrote first and then used as the heart of my proposal for the book.
I met Todd when I was working on a documentary about Dayton, Ohio, as a sort of representative left behind city. It's a PBS frontline documentary that we did. And we came across Todd when he was living in the shelter in Dayton with his girlfriend and there are three young kids. They stood out in the shelter for the one basic reason, which is that they were the only survivors.
family in the shelter with both a father and a mother with kids in the shelter. And they were there despite the fact that Todd actually had a job at the time. Their life had just come unraveled in recent years, just all sorts of troubles, including domestic violence. Todd had a record of domestic violence against his girlfriend, Sarah.
And so they were in the shelter despite the fact that he had this job and the job that he had at the time, he mentioned to me in passing, was that he was making cardboard boxes, working at a small company in Dayton that made cardboard boxes because Dayton has gone from being a city that was once just one of the great hubs of industrial innovation in this country, not just the Wright brothers, but all sorts of other just really major industrial innovations came out of Dayton in the early 20th century. And it's now a city that is
much more, you know, now there's lost so much of its manufacturing base. It's much more now sort of logistics town that benefits from its
being in the middle of the country along a big highway juncture. And it's basically a city that packs and moves stuff that was made elsewhere now. And part of that is that they have got a bunch of companies that make cardboard boxes. And Todd was at one of them. And of course, a lot of the boxes that he was making were going to Amazon. And when he mentioned this to me, I was just in the early stages of thinking about a book about regional inequality and the role that Amazon was playing in
and greatly exacerbating regional inequality in America. And I thought, my goodness, here we are in the city that's gone from being a great sort of vigorous, vital, middle class manufacturing city to now being logistics town. You have this young man, very hardworking, but clearly troubled young man working at the very bottom of this sort of ecosystem, this ecosystem that now stretches all the way to the richest man in the world, the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.
That's how I first conceived of writing a book that was going to give you this entire ecosystem, sort of the not so much about Amazon itself, but about America in the shadow of Amazon and using Amazon as a lens onto the country, this deeply unequal country that we're overcoming.
I'm embarrassed to admit to you that I love Amazon. I order from it constantly. Someone who works there was like, yep, we call you guys power users. And I felt ashamed because, you know, it's sort of easy to be lulled into it because it's just so seamless and convenient.
And then I read a book like yours. And I wonder if you can explain a bit more the stakes of what it is to use and rely on this company. What does it really take for me to be able to get, I don't know, like dish soap in under 24 hours? Oh, there's so much to that. I mean, and this is one goal of the book really was to sort of show you what lies behind that incredible convenience, that sort of one-click kind of life and that
That one-click existence was something that became so much more prevalent, of course, in this last year or two. And I had no idea when I set out to do this book in 2018 that it was going to become so much immensely more urgent by the time I was finishing it. So what lies behind it is so much. You have, for starters, of course, the incredible pressure under which workers in the warehouse struggle.
are laboring to get you that product in a day or two. Just these unbelievable production quotas, unbelievable sort of expectations that they're laboring under being so closely tracked by minute by minute, hour by hour tracked in how whether they're keeping up their rate. So much talk about the rate. That pressure has actually gotten even worse now that the warehouses become more automated. I think a lot of us have this kind of
idealistic notion that as things get more automated, that things can kind of lighten up for the humans that are still working in there. Actually, it's been the reverse in the warehouses because there's even more technology now to track you and your minute-by-minute productivity. And you're also, as there are now more robots in the warehouses, the workers themselves, the humans themselves are actually in a way now kind of being... Their own work has become more robotic, actually. So the work at the job of the picker who used to roam the aisles looking for things...
That was a very tough job back in the day because you were having to walk so much. But there was at least a little bit of autonomy to it. You were off on your own kind of hunting for things. Now, most warehouses, the picker stands in a fixed location all day and the robots are bringing them stuff, the stuff that we're demanding. You have these little robots zooming around with stacks of shelves on them.
And so the robot will zoom up to the person, the picker pulls out whatever it is that are hers desired, puts it on the conveyor belt, and then boom, there comes another robot with something else. And the robots are actually kind of driving the tempo and the humans that are left are there only because they've not yet figured out how to
teach robots how to grab things of different shapes and sizes. And so that's what you're there for is your ability to just to grab that thing. But you're really kind of being driven by the robots and working at their behest. That pressure is the pressure. We know that what effect the pressure has on workers, because it is such a big reason why so many people don't last long at these jobs, even as Amazon has now gradually upped pay. You know, they've now gone from
When I started out reporting this book, they were around $13 an hour. Now they're up to around $18 an hour. So that's, you know, $5 an hour increase over several years. But nonetheless, you have just incredibly high turnover at the warehouses, basically 100% turnover in most warehouses over the course of a year because the jobs are just so grueling and thankless. Let me play the role of Jeff Bezos or someone who works at Amazon and thinks it's great. You know, they'll say,
Sure, sure, sure. But look at all of the jobs that Amazon has created. What do you say to that? Well, they did, of course, did bring that up to me when I was speaking with them. And we have to keep in mind, the most important thing to keep in mind is that those job gains, those new jobs are not happening in a vacuum and a void. They're replacing other jobs. We've seen the biggest wipeout in jobs in recent years. You know, it's not been coal miners or
newspaper reporters, although we've lost many of us, but it's been in brick and mortar retail. There's just been a complete wipeout in brick and mortar retail. And some might say those jobs were generally low paid and so what's the big deal? I think it is a big deal. I think that what you've seen happening, if you think about this big picture, is that we've essentially replaced a whole lot of brick and mortar retail jobs with these warehouse jobs.
And those warehouse jobs might be better paid than some of the old retail jobs were. But it's not just about pay. The jobs are much more grueling and isolating than those retail jobs were. The retail jobs at least had some kind of social interaction, and crucially, social interaction between classes. One of the things I find so troubling now about the new one-click world is that whatever minimal interaction was provided by going to the store to...
talking with someone stacking the shelves or the clerk or someone helping you find things that did provide some kind of between class interaction in a country that's become so atomized and divided, that's now gone.
you're likely not even going to lift your head up as the driver comes up onto the porch or the front step and drops your package. Maybe you give them a nod through the window. So, you have this loss of those retail jobs. In a way, the new jobs that are being created at the warehouses, and there are a lot of them, they're almost in this new no man's land between they're more isolating and grueling than the retail jobs that have been lost. They almost more resemble the assembly line jobs of old.
because they're more physically challenging than a retail job used to be but they're not as well paid as those manufacturing jobs were generally speaking and they also you also have less of a sense of purpose than those manufacturing jobs do one whole chapter my book is about a man who spent decades making working at the steel mill here in baltimore and then came back to work at an amazon warehouse that was built in exactly the spot where the steel mill used to be and one thing that
that he found so maddening about the Amazon job and why he barely lasted there more than a couple of years, is that he just felt no more sense of purpose. It wasn't just that he was being paid half as much. He had felt much less purpose and no camaraderie
with the other workers there the way he'd had at the steel mill. He was all on his own, just driven to keep up rate by these young supervisors who were constantly riding him, not giving him enough time to go to the bathroom. The whole experience was completely degrading, completely undignified compared to what he'd had at the steel job where it was, yes, it was very dangerous. It was very difficult work at the steel job, but he took pride in it. He had a purpose. He had camaraderie. It was a completely different sort of existence.
That's really sort of at the core of the book is what happens to sort of the nature of work when you shift from this sort of mass employment option being work at the factory or at the department store to now being alone there in the warehouse trying to keep rate interacting often with no one except the robots. So what is the ethical choice as a consumer? Like, do you think that the right thing is for me and others to give up Amazon or
Have you given up Amazon? I mean, the whole thing reminds me a little bit about the debate of being a vegetarian or giving up plastic straws, both of which I think are the ethically better choice. But you sort of wonder if it makes a difference when there's so many people making the opposite one. What do you do and what do you recommend for others? So I've not been out there, you know, preaching any kind of boycott or cold turkey, anything like that.
total abstinence. But I do believe that we all have agency. We can all moderate and pull back to some degree. And especially after this last year or two, where as the numbers showed, there was just this huge increase in reliance and use of Amazon and other sort of one-click options. This is where it sort of ties back to everything else we've been talking about. I believe that it is so important that
After this couple of years when so many of us have been so hunkered down that we reemerge and reengage with the physical world around us. And that's not just in terms of shopping and buying stuff, but in all other facets of our life. Getting back to the theater, getting back to the symphony, getting back to the bars and restaurants, getting back to just all the different things that the movie theaters, all the things that make up life. And we've been so hunkered down. And there's actually, there's a political aspect to this too.
We've been especially hunkered down in blue cities and towns. And this is where it gets kind of delicate, politically delicate. I mean, our response to COVID and how we've been as a society responding to it and the measures we've been taking has, of course, been famously polarized, politically polarized. And there's been so much caution, of course, in blue places. And
What this means is that there's been an especially great reliance on Amazon. Amazon was always universal, of course, in its appeal, but it's strongest. It was always stronger in blue places because Walmart still held somewhat of a bigger hold on kind of red America. And that gap has gotten even bigger in the last couple of years because blue America was especially cautious. Blue America was buying even more stuff online to avoid having to go to the store. And so we have this
really kind of politically awkward situation where the party that is supposedly more concerned about the people, the working class, has now become the most reliant on this giant corporation to fulfill its needs. And so you've almost ended up with, I've come to think of it a bit as...
The Amazon coalition, the Democrats in a way have become the Amazon coalition. The party is increasingly made up of a very awkward alliance of middle and upper middle-class people in big blue metros who buy a whole lot of stuff from Amazon. And that those shoppers, those upper middle-class highly educated professionals are mostly white. And then the other half of the coalition are the working class people, mostly black and Latino who are delivering those things to them.
And it's really it's a very awkward coalition. It seems like it's likely a hard one to sustain. It's very kind of upstairs, downstairs in its basic nature. And but that is that's increasingly what do you think of blue cities and progressive lawmakers sort of continue to do what they're doing? That the sort of conservative Republican dream of a multi-ethnic working class democracy
voting base will actually come to fruition. I mean, that's what I see happening. It does appear that we could be heading that way. I mean, the fact that Trump, even as he lost last year, was able to, in 2020, that he was able to increase his share among Latino voters and also with Black men was really striking. And so this is absolutely a cause of concern for the Democrats.
But I do think this goes beyond the risks to the Democrats coalition. I've started to think a lot about the risks that the pandemic and our response to the pandemic is posing to all sorts of institutions that sort of make up life in blue places. All these institutions that really are
especially important or prominent central to life in liberal America. You know, schools, of course, we've talked about, but also colleges, academia, the performing arts, libraries and museums, public transit, independent businesses, the bookstores, all these institutions are in peril because or have been greatly undermined by
by the closures and also by the general sort of hunkering down that has happened in blue America. And I just, I really do worry that some of these institutions are going to be, you know, undermined and harmed in a very lasting way. And I find it's somewhat confounding and inexplicable why
why Blue America has put the institutions that it cares about, the aspects of life and culture that it really values at such risk by having hunkered down for so long. And it also has political aspect to it too. All those institutions are what make up Blue America and what sustains it. And if the institutions are
are weakened, then so is that whole world in general. It will inevitably have sort of have political effects. I've always conceived of liberals as being the more community-minded, socially-minded, you know, let's get together, let's overcome our differences, let's live in cities, let's live densely. A real belief in togetherness and sort of
feel-hello-well-met kind of spirit, whereas the sort of stereotype of the American conservative was
get off my lawn, I've got my alarm system, I got my dog, you know, and that stereotype of a more kind of standoffish, somewhat sort of defensive kind of mindset. And so it's been really striking to watch this inversion in the last couple of years where it's been liberal America that has been much more inclined to really hunker down and withdraw to the point of really almost becoming
you know, fearful of the neighbor, of other people, of other humans. I saw someone tweet the other day that they're scared of indoor air. Oh, yes.
That is where a lot of people are. I mean, I saw a lovely neighbor the other day walking outside alone with an N95 mask. And I felt like we're living in some kind of weird dystopian simulation. Yes, it was. I've seen similar many times. And I just I can't help but keep thinking about what the political ramifications of that are. If you have the places that have always put greater value on.
or I thought had always put greater value on community and togetherness shifting now to a mode of fairly in a long, fairly sort of lasting way that is much more kind of withdrawn and atomized and hunkered down and cocooned. And what that does to life in those cities, the cities that make up
blue America and that is going to have political ramifications for the cities, for the party. And I have found it confounding to watch and just watch how long it's lasting. After the break, I asked Alec how his reporting has changed his view of progressive policies. And we talk about what America looks like in the long run. Stay with us.
I want to pick up on what you just said about, you know, what you assumed liberals valued or blue cities valued and maybe the way that this is challenging it or shifting your ideas about it. I'm curious about how your reporting over the past few years has changed you. You know, when I look at your resume, so many bylines in the
the kind of places any journalism student would kill for. You've won lots of awards. You went to Yale and so on and so forth. But I think the subtext of so much of your reporting hints at a kind of skepticism of, I don't know if this is the right word, but progressive policies that have been put forth to solve our problems. And I wonder if over the past few years,
your own politics have shifted or maybe if they've just gotten harder to categorize as the meaning of these words or what we perceive to be the set meaning of these words have changed? Yeah, that's a very good question. And of course, a tough one. My gosh, yes, you could, if you, you know, dug even further into the resume, you would have seen that I, you know,
worked at a explicitly left of center magazine, The New Republic, for a few years. That was the first magazine I worked for. And I wrote a really pretty tough biography of Mitch McConnell called The Cynic. And I wrote articles about the rise of Scott Walker in Wisconsin, placing him in the context of the really ugly racial politics of Milwaukee. Really tough piece on Paul Ryan and how he kind of tried to style himself as a great public intellectual.
And I stand by all those stories. I stand by my Mitch McConnell book. I am the same person who wrote those articles in that book. And I do believe that the political environment has, something has shifted in the political environment in the last few years. And so the world I'm now writing about is, looks different in a lot of ways. And so you end up with
pieces that may look like they're coming from a different vantage, but I've been taking the same approach of trying to look at things clearly, think independently, not be caught up with the crowd, and then report as much as possible to make sure that whatever I'm writing is grounded in reality. So I guess that would be my answer.
Where is this all going? Like, let's look beyond the current sort of endless pandemic moment. Let's imagine that at some point people are going to take off the masks. What do you see America looking like five or 10 years from now? How do you see it all playing out based on what you're seeing right now?
I think so much depends on us actually coming out of the pandemic moment. As I said before, returning to society and reengaging with the actual world around us. Because it seems possible that even as the pandemic conditions improve and we get through this current spike and really and possibly hopefully don't get hit with some new wave, that we're still going to
remain with a lot of the habits that we picked up in this pandemic and remained that atomized and that virtual. And we keep working from home and we just find that everything is sort of easier and more comfortable if we stay in that mode as much as possible. And
that could be really bad. And it will mean, you know, well, just in the terms of Amazon and the disparities I described in fulfillment in the book, it'll mean just, you know, just growing divides on that front with just the
Sort of negative effects that come from turning our lives over to these digital monopolies and quasi monopolies and in all the just incredible disparities that that they have created Including the one that my book focuses on that the regional one there's this growing disparities between the winner-take-all cities and the left-behind places where you're gonna have just The cities the winner-take-all cities becoming ever more
expensive and kind of just unpleasant places to live, just further loss of character, further growing inequality, just even more unaffordable. And then all these other cities, the Baltimore's and the St. Louis's and the Cleveland's and the Dayton's, you know, suffering ever more from abandonment and just, you know, a divide that is really unhealthy for both sorts of places. And it's so bad for our politics because you'd end up just
having subtle points of commonality anymore. You're basically living in completely different universes. For me, that's the key. It's us actually emerging from this mode. Because I do worry that many of us may just choose to stay in it because it was somehow found to be a more kind of comfortable existence.
And I think that there is, you know, there's like a bad smell to you if you suggest like, hey, guys, any adult in America who wanted to be vaccinated can be vaccinated at this point. And, you know, thank God in a way this Omicron variant seems just way less fatal combined with these lifesaving vaccines. Let's call it. And if you suggest that, it's like you're seen as someone that's sort of not in the community of the good, right?
Because I think a lot of people are feeling that way, but they're too scared to say it out loud. Yes, that dynamic absolutely exists. I mean, I think what I found so difficult is that it's become bizarrely hard to make the case for why it is simply good for us to be back together as humans.
That social contact is important. That it's so important. It's at the heart of everything. I mean, this is basic human nature. This should not be controversial. But that it's important for us to be together. It's important for us to see each other. There's absolutely...
I wear my mask everywhere I'm told to, you know, supposed to wear a mask. But my goodness, of course, it's better for us to be able to see each other, to see human faces, to have, this is very fundamental stuff. And that it's become, it is striking that it's become somehow controversial
in the party or in the side of the political spectrum that has, to my mind, always been more about community and togetherness that has become controversial to make the basic case for human contact and togetherness that I have found very mystifying. Many of the people who are looking at
what I view as sort of the untenable situation that we're living in, focus on these big sweeping changes, right? You have UBI or, you know, what we need is a religious revival or we need to break up the big tech companies or you even have some people on the extreme ends of our politics talking about like breaking the country apart. I hear you emphasizing something else, something that feels to me like
like a more human or more local or personal solution. Is that how we push back against the new reality, sort of the anti-human reality that we've been talking about throughout this conversation? You know, is the right way to invest our energy, not thinking about how we can tweak the algorithm, but maybe how we can sort of get back to, I don't know, front porch values, if I could call it that.
Yes. I wouldn't actually be opposed to some of the items in the list you offered, the sort of bigger picture policy items. I mean, my book does make an implicit case for breaking up the big tech companies. I think that would actually do quite a lot.
to address some of these problems, including regional inequality. But my book, Fulfillment, absolutely was in part an appeal to that dread word, empathy, to build understanding across regions and across classes. We have become so divided, so isolated, that I think there's just this complete incomprehension across these different worlds.
Part of what I was trying to do in the book is to show readers, who are probably mostly going to be in the world of the blue world, of the highly educated blue world, to show them in a very, very granular way, visceral way, what things are like out there, whether it's in the warehouse that's delivering you all your goods or in the life of the guy making the cardboard boxes or the life of the guy who's the truck driver.
who is bringing the stuff to the warehouses just across the board, just to show you
to sort of build back some of those human connections that have been lost as we've drifted apart. And I still hold out hope that those connections are possible. I know they're possible because I have them when I go to these places. I just form incredible connections with people, connections that are maintained through the years. I was back in touch with Todd, the cardboard maker,
just the other day. And I do still believe that we have that in us. And I do see my job as partly as trying to inspire that kind of curiosity and understanding more broadly. Well, Alec, your reporting has certainly done that for me. And I'm so grateful to you for coming on. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Alec, whose excellent reporting really shaped my understanding of the past few years. His new book is called Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and I highly recommend it. If you'd like a different perspective on Amazon, I'd invite you to listen to my conversation with the economist Tyler Cowen from last month. You can find it in our archives under the title, WTF is Going on with the Economy. If you've got tips or guest recommendations, please see us at honestlypod.com.
See you next week.