On the banks of Korle Lagoon in Ghana’s capital of Accra, cattle graze under a cloud-covered sky. Usually, such a pastoral scene would recall rolling green hills in a John Fredrick Herring painting. But Korle Lagoon is anything but picturesque. These cows are grazing not on postcard-perfect pastures but towering mountains of trash. A majority of the landfill—a staggering 60%—is discarded clothing from the industrialized West.
Most people donate their clothes in good conscience, thinking their tossed attire will “help someone in need.” But much of their clothing is sent to places like Ghana and Chile. Developing nations have become a dumping ground for our unwanted waste. An estimated 15 million used garments come into Ghana every week. Clothes that can’t be resold—they’re damaged, torn, missing buttons or spoiled by stains—are simply thrown away. Such careless consumption clogs waterways, pollutes oceans, poisons the air we breathe, and devastates the habitats of millions of species. Because of our voracious appetite for more and more things, these parts of the world are on the verge of climate catastrophe.
In its provocative new documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, Netflix explores the many ways corporations brainwash consumers to buy more—and considers the calamitous impact this has on our society. Buy Now features three whistle-blowers who expose the morally questionable practices of their former employers: Maren Costa, a former user experience designer at Amazon; Eric Liedtke, former Adidas brand president; and Narav Patel, former software engineer at Apple and one of the developers of the Oculus virtual reality headset. Narrated by Sasha, an AI bot who claims to be a personal assistant created to give us “unfiltered insights” on how to be successful in business, the documentary portrays itself as a series of lessons in profit maximization when it’s actually a scathing expose of unfettered consumerism and greedy corporations.
The documentary begins with the first pillar of “business success”: sell more.
Thanks to the internet, shopping has become more convenient than ever before. Today there are almost no obstacles before you can “add to cart.” Forty years ago, if you wanted to buy something—a pair of jeans, say—you’d have to get in your car, drive down the street and endure the overstimulating crowds of your local shopping mall. Once you arrived, you had to find the right store, locate the right color and style and size of jeans and ask a sales clerk to let you into a dressing room so you could try them on. If you liked them, you’d then have to go to the cash register, take out your wallet and swipe your credit card.
But in the age of the internet, this same process is only a few seconds long. Buying is as effortless as tapping “add to cart.”
Behind the hypnotizing blue glow of our screens are thousands of the most brilliant engineers in Silicon Valley.
Their job?
To optimize their websites so we spend us much as possible.
In one of the most compelling interviews, former user experience designer Maren Costa describes shopping at Amazon like a conveyor belt that ships exactly what you want right to your door.
At first, she was passionate about making shopping on Amazon as streamlined as possible. But she soon realized such convenience comes at a cost. Convenience breeds over-consumption. When shopping is so easy, people buy more.
But all the stuff we buy—the tennis shoes, the apple peelers (and don’t forget all the plastic wrapping and shipping containers)—has to go somewhere. Designers like Costa have one job: sell. They’re not thinking about where all this stuff goes.
Consumption is skyrocketing. Take fashion as an example. Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production nearly doubled. Fast fashion, a business model built on producing cheap clothes in response to the latest trends, has conditioned consumers to expect low prices and a rapidly-rotating door of new products. “The shopping cycle, which used to have ebbs and flows, is now less a cycle than a constant stream, a fire hose of product,” writes fashion journalist Vanessa Friedman.
The result is we buy more but value less. According to some statistics, we only wear an item of clothing 7-10 times before tossing it in the trash. Because we buy so excessively, “each thing becomes less important, which means it is even more disposable. When the excitement of getting all that stuff wears off, the stuff itself doesn’t really matter. It just takes up space. And that means it’s easy to throw away,” says Friedman.
Which leads us to the second pillar of business success: waste more.
We live in a throwaway culture. Most businesses operate by the strategy of planned obsolescence: they intentionally design disposable, lower quality products so we the consumers have to replace them more often. Gone are the days of repair and restoration—today when something breaks, most of us would rather just throw it away and replace it.
(“I need to go to the cobbler,” I told my sister when my much-beloved Mary Jane flats started getting holes. She responded with disbelief. “Why don’t you just get new ones?”). The idea that you could (and should) repair something seemed unfathomable.
We no longer believe we have to be good stewards of our things. Most people don’t cherish their belongings—let alone feel responsible for them. A button fall off our favorite cardigan? Most can’t be bothered to take it to the tailor (or even know what a tailor is). Many (myself included) certainly can’t be bothered to mend it. So we resume the toxic consumerist cycle and toss it in the trash.
Corporations of course don’t want you to repair their products—that would cut into their profits. Many tech gadgets like I-phones and laptops are designed to be unfixable so when your laptop battery dies, you have no choice but to get a new one.
In a toss away culture, learning to repair things is a form of resistance. One of the more interesting people interviewed in the documentary is Kyle Wiens, founder and CEO of iFixit, a company dedicated to a “repairable future” in which consumers have access to replacement parts, specialty tools and step-by-step guides so they can fix their own products. “I had always assumed we were not fixing things because it’s not possible, it’s not economically viable. Actually we’re not fixing things because lawyers are going out of their way to censor that knowledge,” Wiens conspiratorially tells the camera.
Not only do corporations conspire to keep us continually buying more, they produce way too many products. Corporations churn out so much merchandise that inevitably much of what they produce is never sold and ends up in landfills. Waste expert and activist Anna Sacks aims to raise consciousness about corporate waste. Known as the the “trash walker” on social media, Sacks tells us that every year, companies throw away millions of perfectly usable products. Her shocking videos most often show her tearing open garbage bags on the streets of New York. Her dumpster dives reveal hundreds of brand new, unused items: bagels, chocolates, Christmas cards.
In her most viral video, Sacks showcases a series of slashed Coach bags. Rather than donate the products or allow them to be resold at a discount which might “tarnish” the brand’s image, companies like Coach require their employees to deliberately destroy unwanted merchandise (even if it’s a perfectly good, stylish several hundred dollar handbag). They then write these products off for a profit. Yet these same companies urge their consumers to “make fashion circular” and claim to “care” about the environment.
@thetrashwalker #coach #donatedontdump #retailmademe #dumpsterdiving #shopping #climatechange #haul #free #eco #recycle #donate #nyc #thrift #repair #fashion #style
♬ Waltz of the Flowers – The Nutcracker – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
When Sacks asked her followers to tell their own retail stories using the hashtag #retailmademe, she was flooded with appalling anecdotes of corporate waste. One former Barnes & Noble cafe employee recalled being forced to open up bakery items, throw them in the trash, and dump coffee grounds on them the day before they expired. An ex-Panda Express employee confessed that at the end of the night, she was required to mix all the left over food together.
I myself have had a similar experience. At my first job as a barista at a small local cafe, my boss—a curmudgeonly middle aged man—demanded I throw out all the pastries at the end of the day. “You can’t take them home,” he asserted. But I couldn’t stand seeing all those chocolate croissants and cheese danishes in the trash. So I took them anyway.
But the question remains: why don’t corporations donate these products to people in need? Why is there this evil determination to let edible food go to waste? Why not let someone actually eat the day old bagels if they’re just going to be disposed of anyway?
Ultimately, the corporate philosophy is dump—not donate. Corporations like Amazon throw away thousands of unsold goods simply because it’s cheaper to dump them than redistribute them to people in need.
The reality is our world is engulfed in flames. 2024 was the hottest year on record. Can we really afford to mass produce mountains of goods that never even leave their shiny plastic packaging?
If the climate crisis is the most crucial issue of our age, why aren’t more people outraged by the deplorable behavior of behemoth corporations like Amazon? Why aren’t they more disgusted with their own conscience-less consumerism?
For the most part, the effects of our sickening shopping levels are hidden away: our plastic water bottles float in remote parts of the Pacific ocean, our last season’s sweater is shipped thousands of miles to the poorest nations. Mounds of discarded fast fashion blight the once beautiful coastlines of Ghana; Safeway shopping bags litter slums in Bangladesh.
The disastrous aftermath of our consumerism is flung “somewhere else.” But “somewhere else” is “here” for much of the developing world.
Overall, Netflix’s subversive Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy is a scathing indictment of the wasteful way we live. Though it might be well trodden territory for those already familiar with climate change and fast fashion, I imagine for most people the film will be an eye-opening experience. 
But Buy Now isn’t faultless. The film relies on a series of trying-too-hard contrivances: hypnotizing psychedelic colors, “Sasha,” the stupid AI-generated narrator. In an interview with TIME magazine, director Nic Stacey justified these choices, saying, “The idea was to try and take the language of advertising—the colorful fantastic world that is used to sell stuff—and turn that back on itself.”
Though the concept was clever in some ways, Sasha felt gimmicky and the organization of the documentary into a series of insider business “lessons” felt like an unnecessary framing device.
As writing teacher Roy Peter Clark explains, when the story is big, write small. Buy Now’s story of environmental catastrophe is a big one. After all, what’s bigger than the possible annihilation of life itself? So why sensationalize the story with such silly narrative devices? The fact that we’re driving ourselves towards apocalypse is dramatic enough. Stacey might have been better off letting the material speak for itself.
Buy Now’s over reliance on contrived (AI? CGI?) images is yet another flaw. In one sequence, an anonymous city overflows with garbage as alarming statistics flash across the screen (2.5 million shoes are produced each hour! 190,000 clothes produced each minute! 12 tons of plastic produced each second!). Nikes rain from the sky. I-phones spill out of trash cans. Clothes crawl up staircases. Humanity is Frankenstein—on the brink of being destroyed by our own creations.
Though these visceral visuals powerfully illustrate the sheer scale of our overconsumption, I couldn’t help but wonder: why use animation when you could have shown very real images?
I much preferred the disturbing footage from around the globe; for example, the sequence of Ghanaian children running across beaches suffocated by clothes. These horrific portraits were tinged with far more pathos.
Buy Now also casts players into familiar roles of heroes and villains (Heroes? Whistleblowers, activists. Villains? Mega multi-national corporations.) Corporate America is portrayed as malevolent and money-obsessed but is that an oversimplification?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not defending greedy, conscience-less, capitalist pigs like Jeff Bezos who willingly wreck havoc on the environment and only care about profits. I’m only saying these issues might be a little more complicated.
Many of those working within corporations can’t be reduced to one-dimensional villains. Take Costa as an example. Did she design Amazon’s interface to make shopping more streamlined? Yes, but does that make her “evil”? Was she sitting at her desk nefariously laughing, “I’m going to swindle millions of people!” No, she was just trying to do her job and make the website as navigable as possible.
Watching Buy Now, you’d think corporations are plotting behind closed doors to take over the world. But the evil isn’t just shady CEOs or scheming shareholders or artful advertisers— it’s the system itself. Capitalism is an economic system whose ultimate goal is maximizing profits. And we all participate in that system.
Yes, the problem is corporations who only care about lining their own pockets and have no sense of responsibility for the planet.
Yes, the problem is marketers who hack our brains, manipulate our emotions and convince us to buy random shit.
But the problem is also a larger economic structure that demands growth no matter what.
Would Costa have designed such an “efficient engine” had she not been pressured to maximize shareholder dividends?
Environmentalism urgently calls us to reduce, reuse and recycle. But capitalism ruthlessly demands companies ceaselessly grow. Can these two things be reconciled?
Despite these shortcomings, Buy Now achieves its central goal: after watching, I know I’ll more carefully consider before adding to cart.
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