The Warehouse by Rob Hart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a disturbing book. A dystopian nightmare combining today's behemoth retail companies (Amazon being the main example) with a century+ ago company town where you were a worker who never went home, because home was right there where you worked, did your shopping, found your relaxation, and all with your money going right back to your employer.

Told from the points of view of a new employee, a corporate spy, and the dying CEO who founded the company, The Warehouse paints a picture of a badly damaged world dominated by pure capitalists willing to use people as nothing more than drones. Take the worst article you've read about working conditions in one of the giant corporations of today, then imagine another 50 years of lobbyists buying favorable regulations, those companies skewing things to crush out every little bit of competition, and employees becoming desperate beyond measure for any way to survive, and there you have the world of "Cloud," the beyond-measure behemoth dominating warehouse-based, online retail sales and crushing the soul out of the world.

I don't want to say too much here, for fear of giving away something I shouldn't. But this novel has elements that should be very recognizable to anyone staying on top of the current state of our world, particularly in comparable business models. It wouldn't be hard to see things heading this way, and that's very disturbing!


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