While watching the new Netflix documentary “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy,” I learned more about how big companies encourage people to buy too much. The film aims to make people more aware of the growing problem of consumer waste by showing interviews with past top executives. When it came out, right before Black Friday 2024, it got 7.1 million views in just five days, making it the most-watched non-true crime documentary of the year.
The documentary, directed by Emmy nominee Nic Stacey and produced by Oscar-winner Grain Media, shows how companies like Amazon, Apple, and Adidas try to get people to keep buying their products. At a time when global industry is at an all-time high—making 12 tons of plastic every second and 190,000 clothes every minute—this release comes at a very important time.
Maren Costa, who used to be Amazon’s main user experience designer, has one of the best voices in the documentary. The film is built around her ideas. Eric Liedtke, who used to be the head of Adidas, was also on the show. After learning how the fashion business hurts the environment, he quit his job to start Unless Collective, a sustainable clothing brand. Liedtke says, “I didn’t do this to make more money; I did it because I had enough money.” “I want to scale the solution so I can look my kids and grandkids in the eye and feel like I did something to solve the issue I helped create.”
Some viewers wrongly think the documentary’s visuals were created using artificial intelligence, which has caused controversy. Stacey clarifies that AI was not used for anything other than the narrator’s voice. Compost Creative, an Emmy-winning company, created stunning imagery that included images of waste covering well-known landmarks. Their statement went like this: “We wanted our work in the film to be beautiful, bold, and funny, and we wanted to use advertising tools against advertisers.”
The film examines many aspects of modern consumerism, such as how Black Friday is artificially spread to markets outside the U.S. and how goods are designed to be hard to fix. One particularly interesting section takes viewers to Ghana, where waste from Western fast fashion has created enormous, colorful mountains of waste.
Mara Einstein, a former MTV marketing executive who took a big pay cut to teach, highlights the structural nature of this issue. She says people think they know how marketing works because they deal with it every day, which is the hardest part of her job. “It’s like a fish in a tank; you think that’s how the world is.”
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Some critics have said that the documentary doesn’t offer any clear answers, but Stacey defends this view. To create momentum for change, he says, the issue needs a variety of voices. In the film’s concluding powerful call to action, Costa urges us to use our outrage. Outrage will create action, which will then create hope.
This documentary serves as both a warning about future consumption trends and a reminder of our current reality, in which 400 million tons of plastic waste are produced annually. The film shows Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever, saying, “As long as we define success as making more stuff and more profits, I think, unfortunately, we are in trouble.”
