On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

Amazon.com went live on July 16, 1995, selling books out of a two-hundred-square-foot basement room in an industrial area of Seattle that had once been used for band practice and still had SONIC JUNGLE spraypainted on the door. By 1997, as founder Jeff Bezos was trying to find funders for Amazon’s IPO, the warehouse had relocated to a 93,000-square-foot space on Seattle’s Dawson Street. Still, investors were skeptical about Bezos’s business plan. “If you’re successful, you’re going to need a warehouse the size of the Library of Congress,” Bezos remembers one man explaining before turning him down. The modern Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, contains 2.1 million square feet, according to the National Park Service. The fulfillment center I’m standing in alone contains more than 2.5 million square feet of storage space, and, as of 2019, when this book will first be published, it won’t even be in the top ten biggest of Amazon’s 175-odd fulfillment and sortation centers in the US.