Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy is a whistleblowing account of the ways big businesses like Amazon, Apple, and others like them keep you buying more and more of things you don’t actually need.
Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy looks at the careful scientific way online sellers have studied human behavior and determined ways to keep you buying. This documentary, directed by Nic Stacey, uses an AI or an algorithm to talk to the viewer. As this algorithm explains what the retailers do, cgi is used to show mountains of waste – mostly plastic – filling streets and cities in a never ending cascade of more and more stuff.

The AI narrator explains the five rules of selling more and gives examples of how the big companies make this work via the web and in the real world as it fills up with more and more stuff. The rules are:
- Sell more
- Lie more
- Waste more
- Hide more
- Control more
As you see, it’s all about more. To keep making a profit, a business must sell you more and more, constantly. More shoes, more hoodies, more tee shirts, more phones, more ear buds, more game controllers, more water bottles, more holiday decorations. The more never ends.
This is an enlightening documentary. I wish everyone would watch it. If you despair because your life is filled with too much stuff, this movie may help you understand what’s happening.
Back in 2010, I read a book called The Story of Stuff. It may also help you with accumulating too much stuff. There’s a Story of Stuff Project website where you can see the original Story of Stuff animated films and learn how to take action. You might learn some ways to avoid so much stuff. Watch Buy Now! and decide if you want to take action against too much stuff.
Buy Now! is streaming on Netflix.
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We found the AI voice to be really annoying and too precious. It felt like a lot of stock footage with narration. We were really interested and invested in this topic, but didn’t think this documentary had the quality or meat we were looking for.
I wondered if the whole thing was AI from start to finish, but it did convey a message. Check out the references I put at the end for a better understanding.