Amazon Everywhere
In Campbellsville, Ky., the tech giant’s influences abound. The profits, not so much.
By David Streitfeld
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.
Source: Read Full Article