Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy

The documentary asks one question: why do we buy so much. It looks for the answer not in advertising but in the product itself: devices designed to fail, parts that cannot be repaired, and interfaces built to make buying frictionless. Nic Stacey writes and directs, Flora Bagenal produces. It runs 84 minutes and went out on Netflix on 20 November 2024. Its force comes from who is speaking. Eric Liedtke, the former brand president of Adidas, Nirav Patel, formerly of Apple, and Paul Polman, the former chief executive of Unilever, describe their own industries from inside. The argument is carried not by an outside critic but by the people who built the system. It connects two ends of a chain: design that makes buying easy at one end, textile dumps in Ghana and Chile at the other. Showing how short the distance between them is, is the film's main work. It was released to land just before Black Friday, and the timing was plainly deliberate. Who it is for: viewers who follow documentaries on consumption, waste and brand strategy. Who it is not for: the film states the problem well and the solutions section is weak. Reducing it at the end to individual consumer choice is contestable.