In the face of the Internet world that has everything, why do people have nothing?

Amazon doesn't care about the city's overtures because it has more power than the city. The power of this capital has brought commercial prosperity and new economic model, but it has affected the social ecology.

The recession of the real economy, the plight of small and medium-sized retailers is obvious, "for every job created, Amazon will lay off two independent retailer employees," but this is only the first step. Due to the change of commercial ecology, the community space formed by commercial inertia in the past decades has also withered, and people no longer care about the life within a few hundred meters. The giant beast of capital forces the city to transfer various rights in order to "attract investment", which in turn infringes the rights of the people and brings the double loss of public space and public discourse right. The various tax exemptions and tax breaks obtained by Amazon have greatly reduced the city's finances, which in turn affect the public construction and social welfare system.

The widening divide between cities is even more troubling because of the peculiarities of the tech economy, as McGillis puts it: "The rich rewards depend on innovation itself, which can generate disproportionate returns with very little additional capital." Once you design a brilliant new piece of software, you can mass-produce it at almost zero cost - no coal, no iron ore. It all depends on having the mind to make the original breakthrough... The feedback loop is so pervasive that the market rebalancing mechanism dispersed to low-cost regions is broken."

In the years after 2008, employment in big cities grew almost twice as fast as in smaller cities, and incomes grew 50% faster. The collective urban boom of the past in the United States is gone. Almost all the rich cities are on the coast, and more than 70% of venture capital goes to California, New York and Massachusetts. "Performing the Bill" analyzes the adverse impact of urban wealth disparity: "The first is the political cost. Voters in lagging districts are resentful, drawn to opportunistic candidates and cynical television outlets, and vulnerable to racists and nativists. Rather than deterring racism and xenophobia, the recession has armed them. In the American political system, which distributes power not just on the basis of population but on the basis of region, this resentment plays a big part, especially in the Senate. As the region declines and hollows out, the regions left behind have accumulated enormous influence and want to express their pain. But the damage doesn't end there. Regional inequalities make it impossible for one part of the country and another part of the country to understand each other."

Fulfillment Center: Witness the overload of labor force

For cities, competing for Amazon means future economic growth; for ordinary people, enjoying Amazon shopping is a convenience of life; for Amazon white-collar employees, Amazon brings them decent jobs and income, although rising housing prices often outweigh income growth. But for those at the bottom, many things are not pretty.

Amazon now has more than 110 fulfillment centers across the country, with warehouses within 25 miles of about half the U.S. population and in nearly every state, allowing it to deliver about half of its orders itself.

But at the same time, it's the hard work of the employees. Night staff at the center work only four days a week, but must work continuously for 12 hours from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., with only a 20-minute break in between. Wear a wristband that records your movements and sends a vibration warning shortly after you leave your workspace. Moving hundreds of items an hour, with the side with the bar code facing up, some items can weigh as much as 22 kilograms and each shift has to travel 19 kilometers.

And that job is being replaced by robots. Amazon has already deployed 200,000 robots around the world to pick and move goods.

Amazon also leases 60 planes and contracts with cargo airlines to use them more frequently, forcing pilots to work 18-hour days as a result. In February 2019, a plane contracted by Amazon crashed near Houston, killing all three people on board.

Amazon also has a fleet of 20,000 diesel vans and 7,500 trailers, and is preparing to order 100,000 electric vans for drivers. But in terms of their labor contracts, the drivers, while delivering exclusively for Amazon, are actually working for contractors. This outsourcing mechanism allows drivers not to enjoy any of Amazon's employee benefits, and in the event of an accident, Amazon can escape responsibility. "In one shift, a driver needs to complete up to 150 deliveries, and they handle 1,000 packages per week. UPS uses high-tech facilities to train drivers and guides them through virtual reality obstacle courses to avoid hazards; In contrast, many of Amazon's drivers don't have access to additional training resources beyond watching instructional videos on their phones."

The number of accidents at the fulfillment Center is also very high, and the serious injury reporting rate is more than twice the national average for the warehousing industry. In 2017, in Illinois, a 57-year-old man named Jollier died of a heart attack because he did not get medical attention in time. His wife later claimed in a lawsuit that warehouse supervisors waited 25 minutes after the accident to call emergency services and also let emergency workers walk through the huge warehouse instead of allowing them access from the loading and unloading area near Jollier's location. The boxes of automated external defibrillators scattered around the warehouse were empty, according to the lawsuit. A year and a half later, a 61-year-old worker died of a heart attack at a warehouse in Murfreesboro, Tenn., when a two-way radio used to signal emergency care failed to work properly.