Same Place, Different World

June Judd not only performed the same job at Fruit for 18 years, she sat at the very same sewing machine. She makes $3.50 less an hour at Amazon than she made at Fruit, but she wasn't with her new company a month before she got her first promotion. Now the spreadsheets that she maintains get zapped straight to Seattle so that vendors can be paid. Amazon relies on her, and Amazon's suppliers rely on her. "If I don't enter the numbers correctly, they don't pay the bills," says Judd. "It's a little overwhelming sometimes. Corporate calls up and says, Why is this figure like this? But I love it. I feel important. I feel like I'm needed, like I'm doing something worth doing. I know people needed underwear -- but this feels more important."

Debbie Stiles's very first dream -- before the brown Trans Am, before being a nurse, before 19 years at Fruit of the Loom -- was to be a stewardess so that she could travel. Jane Bryan's travel academy was an answered prayer. A year ago, Stiles took her first real travel-agent call. Now she's the office administrator for Rosenbluth.

Fruit of the Loom made Campbellsville when it came to town in 1948, and it remade the town when it departed in 1998. What the people of Campbellsville have found, though, is more than a friendlier, computerized version of the old economy with slimmer paychecks -- they have found attitudes that change the way they think about the world and about themselves. The Campbellsville contingent at Amazon gets stock options, just like all the rest of the Amazoners. Those options have changed the perspective of people who had never owned a share of stock before. "At Fruit," says Darlene Netherland, "you never thought about the company's future at all. You didn't think about growth. You just thought about the work. Here, you're always thinking about growth and the future."

In front of the main entrance to the Amazon distribution center is a series of parking spaces with names in faded paint on the asphalt -- a remnant of the Fruit era. One of those names is Netherland. "People tease me about that. 'Oh, you had your own parking space!' " says Netherland. "I've traded that for stock options. I'd much rather have stock options than a designated parking space."

Voices (V): "There's Hope for Everybody"

Arlene Dishman, dressed for work at Amazon looking like a cross between Pat Benatar and a cyborg -- dark hair, black shorts, black shirt, hiking boots, and, on her wrist, a "wrist-rocket" computer with a tiny scanner wired to her index finger: "Here, I get to use my brain. I'm already a trainer. I have no set way of training people. I approach each person differently, as they need to be approached. I've never had anybody who couldn't learn to do this work. I really enjoy when people start learning their jobs, when it really starts clicking for them."

David Joe Perkins, now a manager in the receiving department at Amazon: "Basically, I do the same thing here I did at Fruit of the Loom. Coming to work here is very different though. Any ideas you have about your work are much more listened to here. The people I work with are learning new receiving techniques, for instance. We eliminated a step. I suggested it, we tried it, it worked.

"I was not too comfortable doing that kind of thing at Fruit of the Loom. If you suggested something, you got back, 'We never have done it that way.' Even I said that, if people suggested things to me. Here, everybody makes suggestions, and everybody listens. I personally feel more open. It has had an impact on my life. I listen more, and I learn a lot more by listening. I'm a different person."

Arlene Dishman: "When I was at Fruit of the Loom, I couldn't afford to quit, lose the income, and still pay for college. In some ways, being laid off was the best thing that ever happened to me. What this means to me is, there's hope for everybody."

Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Betty Jane Gorin-Smith provided invaluable research assistance for this article.