Netflix’s ‘Buy Now!’ shows the toll of the global shopping bonanza

‘Every year, we buy more stuff than the year before, and every year we waste more stuff than the year before,’ Stacey says. ‘We can’t keep doing that.’

The new hit Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy may have you reconsidering where to shop and how much to buy on Black Friday — and beyond.

At least, that’s what the documentary’s director Nic Stacey is hoping happens. With a run time of nearly 1.5 hours, the film shines a light on the common, deceptive online marketing techniques used by big-name brands to get consumers to buy more and more goods. That creates mountains of waste and contributes to climate change, plastic pollution and other environmental problems.

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“Every year, we buy more stuff than the year before, and every year we waste more stuff than the year before,” Stacey says. “We can’t keep doing that.”

To tell this sweeping story that spans different industries, online and in-person shopping and countries across the globe, the documentary uses silly animations of talking light bulbs and sneakers, extravagant graphics of cityscapes flooded with stuff and a narrator called Sasha fashioned after digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. The film also features a collection of people who used to work for the very companies called out in the film, including former Unilever Plc Chief Executive Officer Paul Polman and former Amazon.com Inc. designer Maren Costa, all sharing similar stories of having their eyes opened to how their past jobs and employers contributed to overconsumption.

In the week after its release, Buy Now! was the sixth most-watched film in English globally on Netflix, raking in 7.1 million views, a company spokesperson said. And as of Tuesday, there were some 2.4 million posts on TikTok with the “buynow” hashtag. Even people “who aren’t environmentalists have come out of the woodwork having watched this and said: This is terrible,” says Stacey. “And that fills me with hope.”

Ahead of Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, Bloomberg Green spoke with Stacey about his film.

What inspired you to tackle the problem of overconsumption in your documentary? 

My kind of input for this was Black Friday in the UK. Obviously, in the States, it’s a huge thing. Everyone’s at home; there’s Thanksgiving. In the UK, we have none of that cultural context. Ten years ago, you could have stopped anyone in Britain and asked them what Black Friday was — I would guarantee that 99% of people would’ve never heard of it. Over the last 10 to 15 years, it has gone from nothing to being part of the British DNA. Seeing that happen, it incentivizes you to ask yourself: Who has made this happen? And why has it happened?

No company gets more air time in the film than Amazon, much of that through the lens of former employee Maren Costa, who lost her job after organizing internally to get the company to take climate change more seriously. Why focus so much on Amazon and Costa? 

Maren’s just a fantastic communicator and very relatable. I think also the film really fundamentally is about how the rise of the Internet, and online shopping and online advertising, has driven consumption to amazingly greater levels than it was pre-Internet. Amazon has been a huge, huge player in that.

Amazon definitely pioneered that concept of — Maren talks about [it in the film] — the magic conveyer belt that will just get an item to your door from where it is. That really was an amazing innovation and it had lots of sort of benefits, but it also unleashed this whole kind of world.

As a reporter I can struggle with how to convey big numbers, especially around pollution, because it can be hard for people to digest. These numbers come up repeatedly in the film and you have some creative animations and visualizations. 

That was my thing from the beginning: You get bombarded with these statistics all the time, and it is so hard to conjure up what that means in your head. A big part of why this is an issue is because in the places that are consuming the most stuff, we don’t ever get to see that. We’ve made this amazing system to sort of hide it from ourselves.

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[While filming] around New York, we kept seeing these locations. What would it look like if we filled this with, you know, the amount of shoes that are produced every hour? So 2.5 million shoes are produced every hour. When you actually put 2.5 million shoes on screen and show someone what that would look like on a New York street, you suddenly realize why this is a problem. This idea that you throw something away or you give something away — “away” isn’t a magic place, it’s just somewhere else on Earth.

There are a lot of good-intentioned people who don’t trash their clothes, or other items, when they are done with them — they donate. But as you reveal in the film, an alarming number of donations end up on the beaches of Ghana, for example. So how are people supposed to get rid of their stuff responsibly?

It does, ultimately, come back to the companies involved. We interviewed a clothing manufacturer for the film who explained that 10 years ago, when a new item was made, they would wash it 50 times and then write a report about how that piece of clothing performed. Now they either don’t have to do that or they wash it five times and write a report. So baked into the way that a lot of clothes are manufactured is an inherent sort of short term. That’s not your fault as the consumer.

Then there is a problem of what you do with [old clothes]. What happens is donations are gathered up and they’re sold in these bales to clothing markets in Africa or across the world. They’re able to maybe resell 20% of the clothes that have been packaged up. The other 80% or 70% will be fast-fashion items that by their nature can’t be repaired or made good. These crappy clothes, they end up in Ghana; they can’t be repurposed. That’s a long-winded way of saying it is the brand’s responsibility to try and make better-produced clothing because they would genuinely have an afterlife if you want to pass them on.

It’s the week of Black Friday. What advice do you have for people looking to shop in a more climate-friendly and sustainable way? 

The biggest behaviour change I’ve made myself after making this film has been, if ever I think I would like something, I spend at least 5 minutes online looking to see if that item or a similar item is available used before I start looking to buy it new. It is not that time consuming, but it really will make a difference. I would just ask everyone to do that on Black Friday.

The second thing is — just take a pause before you press buy. If it’s something that’s only come up in your head that day or that week, I would suggest that it’s probably something that you might not need. This is the effect advertising is having on you.

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