Amazon is the sine qua non of Digital Age economic and social infrastructure. Its scope is massive: an original retail business (boasting a market share of 50 percent of all digital retail) and highly popular Prime subscription service; its indispensable Amazon Marketplace platform for third-party vendors; its market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure; its Fulfillment-by-Amazon logistics and delivery service (including branded delivery trucks); its numerous other ventures from Kindle e-books to Alexa to Amazon Studios; its hugely popular Whole Foods supermarket empire (acquired in 2017 for a cool $13.7 billion); and its other Amazon Go and Amazon Books retail stores.
It is, in short, the one-stop shop that seems to bind together our fractured body politic. Or that’s what Jeff Bezos wants Americans to believe.
America’s third-largest company by market capitalization has filled the shoes of predecessors like Standard Oil, Sears, and General Electric as an epoch-defining corporation. Indeed, offering enhanced consumer convenience, Amazon now defines an entire way of life. Amazon’s profits soared nearly 200 percent last year as its national fulfillment infrastructure and rapid Prime delivery serviced a lockdown-stricken and home-confined populace. But in spite of its achievement of seamless logistics, Amazon’s dramatic surge has been neither victimless nor costless. Employment at Amazon is infamously tenuous, and the New York Times recently found the company’s black and Hispanic warehouse workers to be “almost 50 percent more likely to be fired” than their white colleagues.
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