''Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America'' is a 2021 nonfiction book by Alec MacGillis that examines

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

Book

MacGillis is a journalist based in Baltimore who now writes for ''

ProPublica ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in New York City. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time reporters, and the resulting stories are distributed to ne ...

''; he previously wrote '' The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell''. In ''Fulfillment'', he takes Amazon to task as an effective

monopoly A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek and ) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic Competition (economics), competition to produce ...

but also argues that the company is contributing to increasing economic and political division in the United States, writing about "the America that fell in the company's lengthening shadow" and Amazon's "outsized role in zero-sum sorting" of inequality that is "making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another". He writes about how its success has been enabled by political influence at both local and national levels.

Reception

Many reviewers praised MacGillis's wide-ranging and nuanced coverage of the issue of economic inequality and of Amazon's role in it, and noted the impact of the book's biographical vignettes as well as its timeliness, after an increase in orders during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

had led to Amazon's most successful year yet. (MacGinnis writes that "it had become our civic duty, our cause larger than ourselves, to fulfill our needs online", drawing an analogy with war.) However, some reviewers found some of these vignettes too tenuously connected to Amazon, and others found sections on the past of various communities sprawling and over-long. A reviewer for the ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'' found MacGillis's argument "a bit far-fetched" since the loss of factory jobs and erosion of the power of labor unions started before the company's founding, and since Amazon's own dominance of the online marketplace is showing signs of weakening.

References

2021 non-fiction books English-language non-fiction books Farrar, Straus and Giroux books Amazon (company)