Amazon’s effect on the planet – economically, societally, even demographically – is amorphous and wide-ranging, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in the United States. Chronicling this influence is Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and losing in one-click America, a panoptic look at Amazon and the nation engulfed by what the author calls its ‘lengthening shadow’. Beyond a mere examination of Amazon’s internal politics (territory already well covered elsewhere), MacGillis’s book traces the lineaments of an America weathered by vast regional and economic disparities, increasing political polarisation, and a fracturing of national cohesion – the exacerbation of which, the author believes, Amazon has played an ‘outsized role’.

MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica, and has written widely on America’s political and socioeconomic undercurrents. This peripatetic journalism shapes Fulfillment, with each chapter navigating a different location and focus. It is full of humanising portraits, too, such as of low-income families struggling to get by, warehouse workers earning a fraction of their former industrial-heyday salaries, and small businesses trying to keep Amazon out of their cities.

Indeed, Amazon’s decimation of small businesses is one of the book’s major themes, with MacGillis showing how the company’s retail dominance has been fuelled by ruthless anti-competitive tactics. Increasingly unable to compete with Amazon’s market share, small businesses are pressured into selling their wares via the company’s online marketplace, where their earnings are then curtailed by a fifteen per cent sales fee. This fee – in tandem with Amazon’s other profitable ventures, such as data storage and video streaming – enables a ‘predatory’ discounting of its own products, which its algorithms then disproportionally promote to customers. A feedback loop is preserved: Amazon’s industry command is strengthened, while the competition faces worsening financial precarity.

Tax avoidance has been another accelerant to Amazon’s rapacious hyper-prosperity. Throughout Fulfillment, MacGillis’s extensive research unveils the glut of subsidies, tax credits, and utility discounts that Amazon secures from local governments before establishing any new location. It even has a department dedicated to the task, an Orwellian office of ‘economic development’. These tax spoils are on full display when Amazon invites applications for site locations for its second corporate headquarters, an unprecedented move igniting a ‘grand nationwide reality show, a Bachelor for cities to compete for the affection of a corporation’, the cause for such sycophancy being that many parts of regional America – particularly those withering in a post-industrial era of globalised trade – see Amazon as a golden goose of employment and land value.

MacGillis argues that this goose is part of the nation’s broader fiscal problems. The company’s ballooning prosperity – as well as that of its other ‘Big Five’ siblings: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple – has stimulated rapid economic concentration in a handful of coastal cities, leaching people from regional areas and destabilising wealth distribution across the country. Further, Amazon’s sheer ubiquity is gradually altering America’s landscape, compartmentalising it on the basis of the company’s logistical needs, having ‘segmented its workforce into classes and spread them across the map’, dividing the nation into ‘engineering and software-developer towns’, ‘datacenter towns’, and ‘warehouse towns’. This gradual ‘sorting out’ is slowly restricting financial mobility for swaths of regional citizens. As MacGillis writes, ‘It had not only altered the national landscape itself, but also the landscape of opportunity in America – the options that lay before people, what they could aspire to do with their lives.’

Moreover, these bustling tech havens are rife with their own problems. MacGillis takes the reader through cities such as Seattle, home of Amazon’s corporate headquarters, where the rising tide of newfound opulence ‘did not lift all boats’. Homelessness abounds, as inflated housing markets leave many unable to afford their bloated rent. The friction of affluence against poverty engenders a startling dissonance: people without housing forced to ‘defecate on sidewalks in a place with $24 lunch salads’; crowds waiting to eat at high-end restaurants overlapping with lines for nearby shelters. MacGillis astutely notes how in many cases this economic upheaval falls along racial lines, with Seattle’s historically Black Central District having been forced out by rising property prices. ‘Gentrification’, he observes, with its implication of the old against the new, is too light a word for this kind of change: its absolution constitutes ‘wholesale erasure’.

This regional disparity, one between America’s wealthy coastal cities and its more isolated, struggling Midwest towns, is ‘making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another’, MacGillis writes. (And an increasingly metropolitan national media – with regional coverage having deteriorated over past decades – only widens this gulf.) Fulfillment offers salient observations regarding America’s shifting political terrain: that this geographical disparity has given rise to an alienated and politically unmoored generation of those living beyond economic centres who feel unrepresented and unheard. The Democratic Party, once the ‘party of the underdog’, today finds itself dominated by ‘highly educated professionals in the wealthiest cities in the country’. For liberal readers, Fulfillment provides a compelling explanation for the political fandom surrounding Donald Trump, who tapped into these veins of disillusionment and abandonment.

The ‘fulfillment’ of MacGillis’s title is manifold. It’s the word emblazoned across Amazon’s nationwide ecosystem of ‘fulfillment centers’ that maintain the expediency of its shipping services, a nod to the satisfaction they’re providing their customers: that one-click endorphin hit. But it also refers to a sense of purpose, not so much the American dream as Americans dreaming of a financially stable life of dignity and self-worth. As Fulfillment compellingly shows, this a viable option for a dwindling few – and corporations such as Amazon, with all their promises of being ‘customer-first’, don’t seem concerned.