[saintx]

At the end of each day, in a University town, you might sit down to enjoy a meal or a cup of coffee at a local café, and strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. The two of you might find quite a lot to talk about, trading ideas and perspectives on different subjects, and ideas would flow between you, like heat from a hot cup of coffee into cold hands. But in a one-shop town (like the one I grew up in, or the one in this story), at the end of the day, what do these hard working people have to talk about? Moving packages. The insult of everyone having the same job is compounded by the injury of every moment of the job being the same as the next. Nobody needs to talk, because there's nothing new to say. There's no "heat" exchange, because everyone is in the same pressure cooker with everyone else. There's no differentiation, just accumulation. Organizations and organisms, to be healthy, need specialized organs. Accumulation without differentiation is what we call "cancer".

[cafard]

" But in a one-shop town (like the one I grew up in, or the one in this story), at the end of the day, what do these hard working people have to talk about?"

Family, sports, national or local politics, world events, movies come to mind. A lot of people are fine with walking out the door at 5 pm and leaving work behind.

[agilebyte]

Are you saying that the place is too big and so it employs too many of the hard working people over there? Some maybe should be unemployed so they can trade perspectives on having vs not having a job?

[zrail]

(please don't compare things to cancer, it does both a disservice)

[saintx]

Of course, you're right about this. I think the comparison detracted from my point, and it was insensitive to people for whom cancer is not a metaphor. So, really it failed on two counts. I'm sorry about that, and am grateful for the feedback.

I was trying (without much success) to highlight a possible underlying principle in organizational development and growth of a local economy, not to imply that Amazon (or any other business) invites comparison to a devastating disease, because I don't believe they do. That town would be better off if Amazon had a half dozen strong competitors just like it, in factories across the street. I just think a town can't rest all its hopes in one company. I grew up in a town with about 600 households and 800 or so people working in one factory. When that factory went away, it was very hard on the local economy, for the families who relied on it, for the schools, and generally for everyone in the community. It seems, and I might be wrong about this, that local policies to encourage and reward entrepreneurial growth and diversification of the local economy could have provided a stronger buffer against the inevitable end of its once solid manufacturing sector. I've been pretty fortunate since then to live in places where there were hundreds of employers competing in dozens of industries, and which had a healthy cultural ferment, many different ideas to talk about, and innovation bubbling up all over the place.

[pdx]

    Accumulation without differentiation is what we call cancer

I have reason to understand that word is a scary word. But I liked the statement a lot. It's factually accurate, and yet poetic as well. I intend to remember it.

[AndrewDucker]

Metaphor is a common part of every language. Please don't ask people not to use it without clear information on why they shouldn't.

[zrail]

Sorry, it's a personal irk. Cancer is a horrible, concrete, real thing that I have experienced far too much of in the past year, and to see it compared to something relatively trivial and abstract makes me immediately dismiss the author's argument.

Edit: Upon further reflection, I guess my point is that "x is cancer" is far too powerful of a metaphor to just throw around. In my opinion it should be reserved for things that have all of the personal heart wrenching connotations that the word implies for people who have experienced it.

[ecopoesis]

Metaphor is fine. Extreme hyperbole is not. We recognize this with Godwin's law.