Amazon is all too easy to dislike.
For those of a persuasion to rage against the capitalist regime, the online giant is the perfect corporate monolith at which to vent.
And the fact that a single company can bring 4,000 new, albeit seasonal, jobs to an economically disadvantaged area such as south west Fife at a stroke will only serve to heighten some people’s suspicions rather than dampen them.
There’s many who believe Amazon has made it through a combination of greed, ruthless ambition and practices that favour the bottom line over the welfare of the workers that deliver it.
Some of that may well be true but I like to take the companies I deal with in the round and I am happy to state that Amazon isn’t all bad.
In fact, another way of looking at Amazon is as an economic powerhouse that has the potential to redefine communities.
I have spent time at the group’s ridiculously large and complex fulfilment centre at Dunfermline and seen first hand how it operates.
The staff are expected to work hard – of that there is no doubt – but this is not 21st Century sweatshop labour.
I’m not stupid enough to think things aren’t given a spruce up before someone like me arrives on site – of course they are.
But Amazon has 1,500 people in permanent employment in Fife and the mask would slip if it was all a lie.
In total, I have spent about five hours walking the many miles of corridors on the Fife site.
Granted that’s not a huge amount of time, but I was not excluded from any part of the site and I did not see anything I viewed as untoward.
There was those obviously looking to impress the boss as he walked by, there were those keeping their heads down to get through to the end of the day and there was also one chap having a (relatively) animated debate with a manager over how a process was being done wrong and could (should) be improved.
What I saw over my two visits to Dunfermline was a mix of people having a mix of days – exactly as I have seen in hundreds of other workplaces in my travels in this job.
I have no doubt there are some who who have had a bad experience while working for Amazon and feel they’ve been let down – or worse.
I’m also sure there’s more Amazon could do for its workers in terms of pay and conditions and opportunities to climb the ladder.
The group also has to learn how to better integrate into the communities in which it chooses to locate and it certainly has a major job to convince the sceptics they are paying tax commensurate with the extraordinary level of business they conduct in the UK.
But what Amazon is doing on an scale unprecedented in my time heading up the business desk at The Courier, is providing real job opportunities in north east Scotland.
If just 10% of the new seasonal intake is eventually kept on at Dunfermline – a figure I would suggest is conservative given the company’s track record from previous years – then that’s 400 more Fifers in employment.
That’s 400 more people with cash in their pockets to spend in the local economy both this Christmas and beyond and 400 more people with the peace of mind that having stable employment brings.
That is a powerful force for good and one that is difficult to argue against from where I am standing.