TEAR, SLAP, CLACK.(The Talk of the Town)

Shortly before sunrise on a summer Tuesday, a truck left a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland. It travelled a mile to a post office. The driver backed up to a loading dock, where fifteen mail carts awaited him. The carts were stacked with boxes of those ubiquitous red pre-paid envelopes, containing DVDs addressed to Netflix. Before 1998, the only option for renting videos was a local store with a few thousand titles. Today, Netflix, as a delivery system, is almost as ingrained as the mail itself. Five million subscribers select movies online, watch them at home, send them back, and pay monthly fees: $17.99 a month for the most popular plan (three at a time, at home or in transit).

By the time the truck is back at the warehouse--one of forty-one similar hubs around the country--and has been unloaded, some forty employees ("associates," in Netflix parlance) are ready for work. The majority are women who were born in Africa and in Asia. At 6:30 A.M., they sit down in ergonomic chairs and begin the process known as "rental return." An associate tears open an envelope that contains a sleeve enclosing a disk, tosses the empty envelope into a recycling bin, removes the DVD from its sleeve, checks the title on the DVD (when "Black Dog" arrives in a sleeve for "The Triangle," the mismatched sleeve is discarded and "Black Dog" is re-sleeved), checks the condition of the sleeve (those with coffee stains or other evidence of having been used as coasters will also be replaced), checks the condition of the DVD (for scratches and cracks), and extracts customer notes ("THROW THIS DAMN DISK AWAY. IT DOES NOT WORK AFTER EPISODE 2, CHAPTER 4!"). Fingers flying and heads swivelling, the women each open between four hundred and fifty and eleven hundred and fifty returned rentals an hour.

Tuesday is the busiest day of the week at Netflix--people tend to watch DVDs on the weekend and mail them back on Mondays--but by 11 A.M. the day's incoming envelopes have been processed and the associates have an hour for lunch. Netflix hires associates from temp agencies, starting at nine dollars an hour. Those who can maintain a fast and accurate pace become permanent employees after three months. Benefits include a free DVD player and a Net-flix subscription. "If I see a title often, I'll take a chance on it," a slender woman from Hong Kong said. She enjoyed the first two seasons of ...