Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy’ on Netflix, a Wide-Ranging Documentary About Toxic Consumerism

Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy is ostensibly a documentary about a serious topic, but it’s presented in the type of sensationalist-infotainment package that renders it a prime slab of Netflix Kontent (sic). Director Nic Stacey (The World According to Jeff Goldblum) aims to expose the dark underbelly of modern consumerism, digging into how modern tech companies, clothing designers and e-commerce businesses get people to buy more and more and more stuff without considering what’ll happen to that stuff once it’s no longer useful. Compelling topic, for sure. He uses the usual documentary means to make his point: talking heads, archival footage and all that stuff. But he also deploys an annoying AI bot as a narrator that you’d want to immediately ship to the landfill, if it wasn’t already overflowing with the old phones, toys and clothing you and I have thrown away. 

BUY NOW! THE SHOPPING CONSPIRACY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Amazon. Adidas. Apple. They’re all global behemoth conglomerates worth billions and billions of dollars, and the big bads of this doc, so they should be able to take some criticism, right? (I dunno, I can see them spending a chunk of their grotesque revenues to lawyer up against any perceived slander. Thin skins abound.) They’re creating and/or selling “objects of desire” that are designed to be used for a short amount of time, then pitched into the dumpster for the newer, sexier versions of said objects. The film’s goal is to illustrate how these companies crassly exploit the idea of “planned obsolescence” for their products by designing tech and clothing to be disposable then essentially brainwashing consumers into buying the stuff over and over again, never considering the consequences of throwing these things away.

Three interviewees are key contributors, each a sort-of whistleblower sharing the troublesome practices of their ex-employers: Maren Costa, a former “user experience designer” at Amazon, explains how the company designed an online shopping platform that makes it alarmingly easy to manipulate people into buying more crap than they need (“one click buying,” anyone?). Eric Liedtke, former Adidas brand president, shares how the garment industry churns out new products – often made with environmentally hazardous plastics – at such a rate that it could clothe the planet’s population many times over. And Narav Patel, former software engineer at Apple, and one of the developers of the Oculus (now known as Quest) virtual-reality headset for Meta, talks about how tech products are purposely designed to be unfixable by consumers, so, say, when the battery in your laptop dies for good, you just pitch it and buy a new one.

We also meet people who are experts in the after-effects of this consumerism. Anna Sacks uses social media to show how companies destroy or throw away perfectly good overstock products (you know “use once and destroy”? Some stuff is “use zero times and destroy”). Kyle Wiens shares how he and his online repair-guide company, iFixit, has received cease-and-desist letters from companies after he posted videos on how to repair their products. Jan Dell points out “lying labels” on products with packaging that proclaim to be recyclable, but inevitably end up in landfills anyway. And Jim Puckett is ID’d as a “waste investigator” who put tracking devices in discarded monitors and learned that “recycling centers” shipped electronics to Thailand, where they were destroyed by hand, exposing workers and the environment to toxic substances.

We also meet something that calls itself Sasha, the AI thing that frequently butts in and speaks as a quasi-representative of corporate thinking, outlining an ironic how-to guide for dominant capitalist consumerism, including steps such as “waste more,” “lie more” and “hide more.” Sasha is a logo, symbolized as a circle of animated eyeballs, and you’ll want to punch it in the face, if it had a face. I think that’s intentional. There’s a lot of stuff in this documentary, and some of it doesn’t get quite the detailed scrutiny it deserves. Maybe something in it should go. Maybe the most annoying thing, like, I dunno, the AI-voice gimmickry?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy are this film’s Netflix predecessors. I guess Shopspiracy was a bridge too far when it comes to documentary titles?

Performance Worth Watching: Costa and Liedtke had powerful enough positions at their former employers to dish out some credible commentary on the ethical compromises big businesses make in order to maximize profits.

Memorable Dialogue: Costa reflects on how she helped streamline Amazon’s shopping experience: “I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of that as it became a more efficient engine. I don’t think we were ever thinking, ‘Where does all this stuff go?’”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So. Elephant-in-the-room time: Doesn’t the use of AI imagery and audio undermine the basic idea of documentaries-as-journalism? After seeing the film’s apparently (obviously, perhaps?) AI-generated images of cities piled high with garbage (think WALL-E), I wondered if real-life shots of Ghanaian sea shores clogged with discarded, unwanted clothing were legit. It’s a muddy juxtaposition, since the phoniness of the former undermines the horror of the latter. Why Stacey made this stylistic choice is curious, and it sure seems to contradict his message about environmental stewardship and how big business puts people over profits.

I understand why Stacey uses the AI voice to represent corporations that spin consumerism as a virtue and use marketing to distract us from the ugly stuff they’re perpetuating; big business wants to divorce itself from the idea that actual people are making decisions based on shareholder desires and bottom-line accounting more than for the greater good. It’s symbolic and ironic. But it’s a gimmick that shows the film’s underlying tryhardism, as if it’s doing everything it can to be a shiny, exciting, interesting thing to watch instead of just the usual straightforward, journalistically sound documentary. The subject matter here is compelling enough that stylistic flourishes are unnecessary.

Buy Now also tries to do a bit too much in 84 minutes. Each of the aforementioned interviewees might deserve their own documentary, especially Costa, who was among many Amazon employees who had a crisis of conscience and pushed owner Jeff Bezos to be more environmentally responsible, a move that eventually got her fired. The film occasionally touches on the philosophical idea of “away,” as in “throwing away” or “giving away,” as it illustrates how garbage is illegally shipped overseas, and clothing donated to charities is sent to “countries in need” like Ghana, which have way too much of the stuff, and end up haphazardly dumping it – a topic with such significant societal and economic ramifications, it demands more detailed examination.

The doc lightly addresses significant problems – among them the gross lack of corporate foresight and manipulative marketing – before delivering a kind of half-assed message about being responsible consumers. BUY LESS is one message, and other calls-to-action are TRY TO FIX YOUR OWN JUNK and CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSON. Meanwhile, a few of the former employees of ethically dubious corporations look into the camera, admit their complicity and vow to make things better. One thing the film doesn’t address is how conglomerates like that hold all the power to make positive change, but always push responsibility to powerless consumers, because it’s easier to deflect and distract and kowtow to shareholders than actually do the right thing. But that’s a whole other documentary, too.

Our Call: Buy Now delivers a few eye-opening facts and figures and exposes some ugly corporate practices, but it’s ultimately too annoyingly gimmicky and thematically cluttered to be effective. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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