Amazon’s Plague Year

As small businesses closed and layoffs hit, Amazon expanded its power — despite a string of crises and worker uprisings

Brian Merchant
OneZero
Published in
6 min readDec 21, 2020

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A photo of an Amazon package in one of the company’s fulfillment centers.
Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/picture alliance via Getty Images

When the Covid crisis went into full swing in March, two trend lines emerged almost immediately: Small businesses were forced to close down, and Amazon started hiring. At the time, I worried that as the pandemic raged we would see…

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Brian Merchant
OneZero

Senior editor, OneZero, books, futures, fiction. Author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, founder of Terraform @ Motherboard @ VICE.