How Roundup, Montana became a major Amazon "prepping" center. At one level, it's about the modern digital economy. At another, it's classic economic geography 1/ theverge.com/2019/11/14/209…
When I was writing about this stuff, I loved to linger on the stories about how industrial clusters came into being — often as the result of seemingly trivial events. For example, the carpet center of Dalton GA originated in a tufted bedspread 2/ 
In the case of Roundup, one person who had some stuff to sell figured out that there was money to be made in prepping other people's stuff for Amazon; friends and neighbors got into the business; and now there's a novel sort of industrial cluster 3/
One other lesson of this story is that Amazon only looks like an ethereal enterprise, living in cyberspace and untouched by human hands. In fact its business depends on a huge distribution workforce, with a lot of bricks-and-mortar capital 4/
