The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, ed. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson/Ellen Reese, Pluto Press Sept. 2020, Paperback ISBN: 97807453441484.
This is an anthology of articles, mostly by academic sociologists and reprinted from scholarly journals. You will not read it for pleasure but perhaps for information. You may have noticed that some Amazon deliveries are made by people in street clothes driving their own cars, and others are made by uniformed drivers of Amazon Prime electric vans. If you want to know exactly how this works and why Amazon has structured it this way, you will find that here. If you want a laudatory or critical study of Amazon the company with personal histories, anecdotes, and interviews with bosses and ex-bosses, look elsewhere. Brad Stone's
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon was a critical best-seller.
If you're bored and you need a laugh, look up
The Everything Store on Amazon's web site and check the customer reviews. The first is a 20,000 word one-star review by Andy Jassy, who is now Amazon's CEO, titled "Kind of like Billy Blaze in Night Shift." Jassy is one of the Amazon bosses Brad Stone interviewed. Jassy was actually there at all those management meetings, and he has all the corporate records and his own personal notes. It was easy for him to do a keyword search through
The Everything Store for all the things Brad Stone got wrong and make him sound like a clueless amateur with an axe to grind. That is why I prefer an anthology of articles from scholarly journals. "The facts, ma'am, just the facts." Facts about Amazon deliveries and how they work, without having to work there. If there are still people in the next century, perhaps there will be
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Amazon Empire.