Before e-commerce giant Amazon awarded Long Island City the H2Q½ prize (initially H2Q), it asked New York City to provide information about specific goods sold at a Whole Foods grocery in that rapidly gentrifying part of Queens. Amazon wanted to know the costs of an avocado, a loaf of whole wheat bread, and a gallon of 2 percent milk. One gathers that the human and resources experts at Amazon perceived these items as crucial to the Amazonian diet. This is what you feed them. They cannot live without avocado toast and coffee. Many even consider this diet to be a millennial vice. Forget student debt, forget skyrocketing home values—it is an addiction to avocado toast that is bringing a whole segment of a generation down. Amazon appears to be on the same page with this way of reading millennials. The experts are paying attention.

And so, information about these items will offer the corporation an idea of how a community might impact the lives of their young employees. If cheap, count it as a positive impact on an Amazonian's quality of life. If expensive, count it as a negative impact, which, in turn, might negatively impact job performance. (Other finalists the competition, such as Somerville, Massachusetts, were also asked about the cost of their avocados in Whole Foods.) And, yes, Amazon owns Whole Foods.

Amazon:

Specify the cost of a basket of goods in your community. The basket is from Whole Foods: gallon of 2% milk, loaf of whole wheat bread, and an avocado. Also, the cost of Starbucks tall coffee, movie ticket, monthly gym membership (individual) at a YMCA (if U.S.), dry cleaning of a shirt, and a gallon of gas.

Now, let's think about all of this for a moment. Amazon might have an idea of what a future employee of H2Q½ eats and drinks. But that Queens location promises "25,000 good-paying jobs over 10 years." Keep the words "good-paying" in mind, as we take the needed Marxist turn in this short post. And by Marxist, I do not mean "socialism." (There is actually very little in Marx's works that explicates, at length, this form of post-capitalist society because Marx was mainly preoccupied with developing critical tools for the critique, not so much of capitalism itself, but the way it was examined and represented in what, in his times, constituted the nascent discipline of political economy, the study of the "nature and causes of the wealth of nations"; to read a lucid account of the history of this profession, and its development, its key arguments, and final transition into the academic study called economics, obtain Mariana Mazzucato's new book, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy.)

Now, let's ask this question: Can what is said about the diet of an employee at H2Q½ be said of one in a fulfillment center? What does the corporation expect a person in one of its many gigantic warehouses eats? Avocados? At pay that feels the powerful gravity of the minimum wage? The typical "Amazon Fulfillment Associate salary is $12. Fulfillment Associate salaries at Amazon can range from $10 - $16."

And here we meet reality: