The day after the 2013 holiday meltdown, Clark called Michael Indresano, a former FedEx executive who had joined Amazon as a transportation director, and asked how many “sortation centers” they could build before the next holiday peak. These were the facilities that consolidated packages by zip code and injected them into the U.S. Postal Service for last-mile delivery to people’s homes. Indresano estimated that he could open sixteen by the end of 2014. “Build ’em all!” Clark replied. Inside Amazon, the rapid creation of sort centers in cities like Atlanta, Miami, and Nashville was dubbed “the
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