Sunday 27th September 2020, 4.30pm (day 3,321)
After yesterday’s leafiness, a bleaker vision of modern-day Yorkshire. I happened to pass this on a bus today: Amazon’s distribution centre for northern England, just outside Doncaster. A gigantic warehouse, but windowless, blank and impenetrable. Anyone unlucky enough to be working within will be robotised, denied rights and capable of being fired by SMS at any time (these practices have been documented in a recent report by the Open Markets Institute). Meanwhile, they charge 50% markup on the price of my recent book compared to what it costs to get it direct from the publisher. They pay little tax on these gigantic profits and our high streets decay ever more. Amazon are evil.
