Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy Review – Strong message, poor execution

Strong message, poor execution

Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy is the latest documentary on Netflix, aiming to hit the same cultural zeitgeist as Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy. While the message is good and definitely needs to get out there, the execution and omittance of certain marketing aspects does make this more of a misfire than it should be.

Narrated by former experts and whistle-blowers at big companies like Adidas and Amazon, alongside an annoying AI (more on that shortly), the film breaks its structure up into 5 unique ways that companies try to hoodwink and manipulate customers into consuming more and more while asking less and less questions.

There’s undoubtedly a lot of good content in this documentary, with a whole section detailing Planned obsolescence. For those unaware, it’s a business strategy where products are intentionally designed to break quickly so that we’re encouraged to buy new products quicker.

The insidious way this is dived into includes Apple changing the screws to open up their iPhones, preventing repairs from occurring, components being glued together (for the same reason) and even takedown requests to companies trying to encourage consumers to fix their own products.

However, on this same topics of repairs, the documentary is a little skewed in one direction. We’re told to repair out products more often using repairmen… but when you’re quoted (like I was) £180 to fix a broken drum on a washing machine, but I can get a shiny new one for £200, it feels a little disingenuous not to include this – especially with a little section about Black Friday sales in here!

Of course, this problem doesn’t stick with just electronics though, and seeing the mountains of discarded clothes washing up on Ghanian shores, or seeing massive graveyards of discarded and rusted cars is pretty eye-opening.

The documentary mostly centers on the general business and sales strategies of these companies, going into detail about how Amazon and Apple in particular have perfected their websites and products to make shopping and consuming that much more effective. All the while, sidestepping the massive elephant in the room – the media.

To be fair, there is a whole section here surrounding how products revolve on shelves through holidays, and the intense desire to drive consumers to buy more, but never the insidious techniques companies use. The influencer culture is shown in little TikTok videos but never once mentioned with companies reaching out to get them to advocate for their products.

FOMO is a massive driver for people buying products but it’s not mentioned once here. For those unaware, FOMO stands for “fear of missing out” and it’s a marketing technique used in many industries. Videogame companies have absolutely perfected this with things like “deluxe editions”, “pre-order bonuses” and “day one XP boosts” to try and hook people in quickly.

Newspapers, magazines and positive press surrounding shiny new products don’t make a single entry in this film, which is odd given there’s a section around controlling the narrative. And on that same note, I can only imagine the absolute irony of watching this on Netflix’s ad-tiered plan too.

The only reason I’m bringing these issues up is because Buy Now could have been a massively effective documentary, but it stumbles way too often around topics it easily could have gone into more detail on. The disingenuous way the documentary ends with one man telling us “just buy less, that’ll help,” is a delicious bit of irony too.

All of this is driven into a weird dystopian bubble of an AI narrator driving the story forward, complete with AI images of spewing products littering the streets. It’s certainly effective for getting the message across but again, hilariously ironic given the tremendous amount of energy that AI uses to generate these images.

This AI voice and style is very much going to be a love/hate affair and personally, I think it detracts from the overall message – which at its core, is an important one. There are some incredibly powerful moments in this film, and for that alone, this one’s worth watching. I just wish the execution was better because it holds this back from being a great documentary.

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