"I say Amazon, you say 'efficiency'," a supervisor chants.
"Amazon!"
"Efficiency."
High fives followed by mandatory stretches, which will be needed for 10 miles of walk-jogging you'll do on your shift. Peeing in a bottle as you go. (Jesus, what do the women do? Is there porn available?) Just curious.
Yet, for all of the complaints you read in the MSM, folks still line up for hours to get a job at an Amazon FC. It's really unbelievable. Check it out! About the only place in the world where Bezos has been beaten down and forced to retreat, with big teal balls between his legs, is China. You could say, he's gone unfulfilled, the luff has left his sales there. In 2004, they bought into China through Joyo.Com and stayed 15 years, trying to enlarge and stretch their fulfilling presence, building 15 FCs around China, with 800,000 square meters of warehouse space allotted. It was Amazon's largest distribution network outside the United States But after getting clobbered by China they 're own online retail giant, Ali Baba, they closed down in 2019, leaving only Amazon Prime and purchases from overseas Amazon sites. Rumor has it that the abandoned FCs have been turned into re-education centers and jai alai frontons.
Of course, it's also one more gloomy reminder of Empire's end; that the Chinese are beating us at our own game, laughing at us for thinking they'd fall for that opium-capitalism scam again. We can boast we have the world's richest billionaire, the ever-loveable Jeff Bezos, but China is winning the influence war, their New Silk Road project is peeing on our gimpy PNAC. We're just another Wall Street Bailout, one more bubble burst away from China wrestling the world currency away from us, and asking us if we're done with that fat dumpling we called capital-fed democracy.
Speaking of Empires. The 2021 Oscar-winning film, Nomadland is, in the beginning, set in Empire, Nevada. It's January 2019, a year before Covid-19 set down in America, and the 60-something widow Fern is about to hit the road in her campervan, snow on the ground, sky gray, a nomad on the winter road to nowhere in particular. Her future is uncertain; she's heading toward where the jobs may be (told "good luck with that"); she's free, but alone.
Nomadland stars Frances McDormand in another outstanding role as a regional local (she's an outstanding regional local wherever she goes), taking home the Oscar for Best Actress, to join the other Oscars she won for her roles in Fargo (1997) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2018). There are no other "big" name actors in the film, other than Amazon. There are quite a few real-life nomads playing themselves in the film, providing a kind of odd verisimilitude, as if real people were actors in their own lives.
By the time you are done watching the film, you wonder one thing? Was that not the largest product placement for a movie of all time? The film begins and ends with Fern working at an Amazon Fulfillment Center. The product is woven into the story, and many of the characters have Amazon stories to tell. But most of those stories are not like the ones described at the beginning of this piece. In Nomadland, characters, though functioning and getting on with it, seem washed out, but not complaining about working conditions. It's definitely not directly an assault on Amazon, but you wonder if the producers agreed to tone it down to gain permission to bring the online retailer and its fulfillment centers into the film's story. Did the Oscar-winning film verdently (or in-) help make Jeff Bezos even richer with this two-hour ad?
In the end, it seems it's not so much product placement as it is that characters have been placed in an ad for Amazon; that its function is seen as a way of life. At local motels there are mate rates for Amazon workers, special RV paid camps for its casual workers, that such seasonal work is seen by characters as benign. Fern even answers early on, when asked how she likes working there (Brandy: How is it? You like it?), "Yes. Great Money." She's making $15 an hour, the national minimum wage many activists are urging Joe Biden to push through Congress - like he promised. But Fern's arrived. Of course, there's the question of whether she can live off that kind of wage -- some argue that $15 an hour is not a living wage-- which is where her campervan comes in.
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