"We are a
business, yes, but our larger goal is something more intangible: the
age-old promotion of the book as a tool that can open minds and bring
communities together." Quoting from the Blog of Village Books.:
“The price is $27.95 and I can hold it under your name at our front counter,” I say to the customer on the phone.
There’s an awkward pause on the other end of the line. I know she’s
looking at the Amazon screen, where the price is $16.05, sometimes even
less. She knows that I know. The silence lengthens. She wants to buy
local, but how can she justify paying almost twice as much?
In the past I’ve tried to win customers over by playing Amazon’s
game. I tell them about our discounts, sales, bargain books, etc. But a
series of articles written in the last year have shown me that I’m
really missing the point. Amazon and other internet discounters can
afford to offer lower prices because they’ve created a new kind of
American sweatshop.
The world of internet shipping that Mac McClelland (
Mother Jones, March/April 2012), Vanessa Veselka (
The Atlantic, December 2012), and Hal Benton and Susan Kelleher (
Seattle Times,
April 4, 2012) describe in their articles is one of vast, airless
warehouses where workers are expected to speed walk 10 to 15 miles a day
on concrete floors to meet goals that are set right at the limits of
human “productivity.” Temperatures vary wildly in summer and winter. In
a now famous incident Amazon actually had ambulances parked outside a
Pennsylvania warehouse waiting for workers to drop from heat exhaustion.
As one older lady succinctly put it: “You need to take 800 milligrams
of Advil a day to work here.”
Most of these companies rely on “temp” workers, who have not rights
or benefits and who can be fired on the spot for such offenses as, I kid
you not, speaking to a fellow co-worker. Amazon appears “progressive”
in this environment because they offer some full-time employment and
more than one bathroom break a shift. More importantly, Jeff Bezos long
ago mastered the motivational language of business textbooks. “Work
Hard, Have Fun, Make History” is painted in giant letters in every
warehouse. Workers are “associates,” supervisors are “team leaders,” and
distribution warehouses are “fulfillment centers.” In the age of
Dilbert
it’s hard to believe that anyone would believe this con; but Veselka,
who tried to organize a union at Amazon in 2000, says that Bezos figured
out that what people really wanted is a sense of belonging, of being
part of something new. With their sense of “belonging” the moonlighting
artists didn’t seem to notice they were handing over their labor rights.
Meanwhile, in the background, the real driving force in these
warehouses was a much more enduring American value: profit. By 2000
Bezos had stated his ambition to become “the Walmart of the Internet.”
He fired those in his inner circle arguing for better working conditions
and closed the one Seattle call center nearing unionization. It was all
about production numbers. Here’s what the “fulfilling” version of the
Amazon assembly line looks like in 2012: With computerized devices in
their hands each picker’s movements are tracked “to the step,” the
number of items picked “per minute” is logged on the supervisor’s
computer, and any dip in these numbers causes him or her to magically
appear at the picker’s side for some “coaching.” The top “producers” are
announced over the loudspeakers at midday like the popular kids in
class, mistakes of all kinds are recorded and employees “written up,”
and the slower or injured workers are picked off (fired) like the
proverbial weaker members of the herd. As one former manager explained,
“They would have meetings about how to fire people who were hurt.”
The shrinking of wages and unions over the last 30 years is well
documented, and not all of it can be laid at Amazon’s feet (as much as
I’d like to). But even within this new downwardly-mobile economy there
are two kinds of business models. I, like some of my compatriots at
Amazon, have benefits, but my employers will not threaten me if I use
them. More importantly, my employers love what they sell and love the
community that they sell it in. It’s at least as important to them that I
love books and can share that with customers, as it is that I perform
“x” amount of keystrokes on the cash register per hour. We are a
business, yes, but our larger goal is something more intangible: the
age-old promotion of the book as a tool that can open minds and bring
communities together.
Amazon provides its employees – at least the half of its workforce
that work in warehouses – with none of this, for the simple fact that
when you sell a hardcover book for $16.05 and a paperback for $11.15 you
can’t afford it. All those indefinable qualities like employee
satisfaction go out the window. I always think of that
I Love Lucy
episode with Lucy being overwhelmed by pieces of chocolate in the candy
factory – only minus the comedy. The lower the price the more brutal
the assembly line has to be. It’s not rocket science.
So the next time you shop with us think of it as not only supporting local business, but
not supporting
a system that devalues everything in its path. And this goes for
everything on the internet that is sold cheaply. There’s no getting
around the simple truth that quality and fairness cost money (although
as consumers we keep on trying!). All the way long the wonderful chain
of the book business – from authors and editors to your local bookseller
– Amazon’s pricing policies are hurting quality and putting artisans
out of business. Even in the e-book realm, where the warehouse is not an
issue, cheap pricing relies on the sacrifice of traditional arts like
editing, not to mention the many environmental and labor issues swirling
around the manufacture of e-readers. (But that’s another article.)
A physical book is a work of art that can last literally hundreds of years. $27.95 -- it’s worth every penny.
--Rem
