Prime Anchor: An Amazon Warehouse Town Dreams of a Better Life - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/technology/amazon-kentucky.html
CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. — In the late 1990s, the town of Campbellsville in central Kentucky suffered a powerful jolt when its Fruit of the Loom textile plant closed. Thousands of jobs making underwear went to Central America, taking the community’s pride with them.
Unemployment hit 28 percent before an unlikely savior arrived as the century was ending: a madly ambitious start-up that let people buy books, movies and music through their computers.
Amazon leased a Fruit of the Loom warehouse about a mile from the factory and converted it into a fulfillment center to speed its packages to Indianapolis and Nashville and Columbus. Its workers, many of them Fruit veterans, earned less than what the textile work had paid but the digital excitement was overwhelming.
Twenty years later, Amazon is one of the world’s most highly valued companies and one of the most influential. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, has accumulated a vast fortune. In Seattle, Amazon built a $4 billion urban campus, redefining a swath of the city.
The outcome has been different in Campbellsville, the only sizable community in Taylor County. The county population has stalled at 25,000. Median household income has barely kept pace with inflation. Nearly one in five people in the county lives in poverty, more than in 2000.
The divergent fates offer a window into what towns can give to tech behemoths over decades — and what exactly they get in return. Campbellsville’s warehouse was among the first of what are now an estimated 477 Amazon fulfillment centers, delivery stations and other outposts around the country. That makes Campbellsville, with 11,415 inhabitants, a case study for what may happen elsewhere as Amazon continues expanding.
No one wants Amazon to leave, though. It is Campbellsville’s largest private employer. Its online mall has given the town’s shoppers access to a paradise of goods.
Less visibly, Amazon shapes the local economy, including which businesses survive and which will not be coming to town at all. It supplies small-screen entertainment every night, influences how the schools and the library use technology and even determined the taxes everyone pays.
What Mr. Perkins did not like were Amazon’s managers.
“My manager called me into the office one day and said, ‘Dave, your performance is not what it needs to be.’ I said, ‘How can I improve?’ He said, ‘You don’t fire enough people.’”
Several months later, Mr. Perkins was let go with little explanation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, life in Campbellsville revolved around Fruit. Townspeople learned not to be near downtown when the plant let out at 4 p.m. and traffic briefly became overwhelming. When Fruit shut down for the first two weeks in July every year, the town was so dead that other industries in the area scheduled their vacations for the same time. Fruit officials were active in the Chamber of Commerce, civic clubs and associations.
Amazon is not like that.
“Amazon is everywhere and nowhere,” Mrs. Gorin said. “This town runs on Amazon, but their employees are not in positions of political power.”
Amazon is linked into the community in other ways that often end up benefiting Amazon. In 2016, the company donated 25 Kindle Fire tablets to Campbellsville kindergarten and first grade classrooms. It also donated $2,500 in “content.” The town schools are increasingly buying supplies from Amazon for a total of about $50,000 in the last fiscal year, records show.