This sort of arbitrage is common and has helped Amazon both expand its catalog and sap its competitors. Though she had exhausted her supply of books, she found she could buy all manner of goods (razors, K-Y Jelly, first-aid kits) from other retailers and sell those on Amazon for a profit, too. She soon found herself sucked into the world of Amazon Marketplace, the company’s platform for third-party sellers that now represents the majority of goods sold on the site. Kristal Graham, 39, had moved to the area ten years earlier to work on a ranch, but when her brother died, she turned to Amazon to sell off his books. Instead, Roundup is home to a growing industry of prep centers, businesses that specialize in packing goods to meet the demanding requirements of Amazon’s highly automated warehouses. In fact, there’s no official Amazon presence of any kind. There’s no fulfillment center, Amazon’s term for the enormous warehouses where it stores and dispatches goods. Even by Amazon’s standards, Roundup is an oddity. Roundup is, in short, just about the last place you might expect to become a nexus of international e-commerce.īut the geography of Amazon is strange: more than 150 million square feet of warehouses, distribution centers, and sortation depots located mostly in exurban sprawls and industrial zones, out of sight of the millions of customers who receive its goods on their doorstep. Its Main Street is lined with homages to its frontier past: silhouettes of cowboys painted on boarded-up windows dust-covered wagon wheels in otherwise empty storefronts a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.” With a lone traffic signal flashing red, it just makes the cut for being a one-stoplight town. Founded by homesteaders and ranchers in the late 19th century, it enjoyed boomlets as a coal town and a station along the Milwaukee railroad, but the coal tapped out and the train shut down, and the town’s population has now sunk below 2,000. On any given day, thousands of packages from Walmarts, Targets, and stores around the country travel north along a two-lane road out of Billings, Montana - past the Tumbleweed Saloon, past cows grazing on empty rangeland, past the Busy Bee Cafe and stands of short pines - to the town of Roundup, where they will be unboxed, re-boxed, and sent off to Amazon.Īt first glance, Roundup does not appear to be a hub for much of anything.
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