The Unnerving Things We Learned From ‘Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy’

The Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy reveals a harsh truth: It’s time to rethink your relationship with retail and confront the environmental impact of overconsumption.
Reading Time: 6 minutes

The way we shop has changed drastically in the digital age. When you can buy anything, anywhere, any time with the click of a button on your mobile phone, mindfulness is the last thing on your, well, mind. Online shopping may have provided us with ease and convenience, but there are inevitable downsides. In the Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, Maren Costa, former user experience designer at Amazon, says, “The system was really being built and optimized to help you buy everything that you ever need, and more of it than you ever thought you needed.” 

Whereas before, you would have to physically make your way to the store to purchase an item, you can now do it in your PJs without even having to leave your bed, let alone your house. It’s that same ease and convenience that reduces the time it takes for you to decide whether what you’re buying is really something you need.

What’s more, every day we are bombarded with marketing efforts specifically aimed at making us think that we’re buying not just an item, but a lifestyle. We’re buying into a culture, and a community of like-minded people, often embodied by today’s biggest tastemakers. 

If you’re looking to curb your spending in 2025 or, at the very least, become a more intentional shopper, you need to watch this documentary. Insiders and experts expose the ways we are being manipulated to buy, buy, buy, and explore the dangerous consequences of our collective shopping habits when left unchecked. 

Here are a few sobering points from the documentary that may shock you (and hopefully make you think twice about hitting that check-out button): 

They don’t make them like they used to.

And that’s by design. 

Once upon a time, light bulbs were made to last a hundred years. But in 1925, the Phoebus cartel, made up of senior executives of light bulb manufacturers, decided to shorten the light bulb’s lifespan to 1,000 hours to maximize profit, giving birth to what’s known as “planned obsolescence.” The shorter the lifespan of products, the more frequently you’ll need to purchase replacements, which obviously equals to more significant profit. 

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Today, this concept applies to almost all products across all industries. This is why your fast-fashion purchase only lasts several washes, why the printer you bought just a few months ago already needs replacing, why your laptop’s lifespan is finite, and why iPhones are rendered almost obsolete within two years (three years if you’re lucky). 

Today’s business model relies on creating new products every year to encourage consumers to discard and replace the products they already have, whether they need to or not. And that creates a huge amount of waste. To illustrate, there are only eight billion people on Earth, but the fashion industry is producing 100 billion pieces of clothes every year, and we are discarding 13 million phones every day!

Nirav Patel is the founder and CEO of Framework, a company that builds electronics that are easy to repair and designed to minimize the impact on the environment. He started at Apple and was part of the founding team of Oculus. According to him, today’s consumer electronics are designed to be thrown away in only a few years. “Even though they are incredibly advanced and expensive, and in some ways almost the pinnacle of our industrial capability as a civilization, they are basically throwaway objects.”

There are only eight billion people on Earth, but the fashion industry is producing 100 billion pieces of clothes every year, and we are discarding 13 million phones every day.

Your electronics are largely repair-proof.

So not only are products not made to last, but they’re also difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And that’s also by design.

Karl Wiens, co-founder and CEO of iFixit, a company that advocates repairing your old stuff rather than throwing them out, points out that you could repair electronics or buy replacement parts in the past. These days, companies go out of their way to make their products tamperproof. From changing the shape of the screws on your mobile phones to using irreplaceable batteries on wireless earbuds to gluing parts together just to make it impossible to dismantle products for repair without destroying them in the process. 

Those expensive wireless earbuds? In 18 months, you’ll have to replace them with a new pair. This practice contributes to the culture of disposability, and the impact on the environment is catastrophic.

Companies destroy and dispose of perfectly usable items.

If you’ve ever been on the dumpster-diving side of TikTok, you would have most likely come across videos of people finding practically new or perfectly usable items in the trash. You would also probably have been served content by Anna Sacks, a.k.a. @thetrashwalker, on your FYP.

Anna Sacks has found everything from packs of chocolates to designer bags to bagels thrown out in trash bags on sidewalks. She has also discovered something far more nefarious: Aside from making their employees get rid of excess or unwanted merchandise, retail companies are ordering their employees to deliberately destroy the items to prevent them from being resold or donated, as this could “cheapen” their brands. 

Now imagine buying an expensive LEGO set only to find out that a lot of the unsold units ended up in a landfill because, as Maren Costa points out, Amazon probably computed the cost of redistributing them and found that it would be cheaper to dispose of them. Or imagine buying a bag of M&Ms to bring back home to relatives from your US trip and discovering that excess packages are lying in a trash bag by the curb. The amount of waste is staggering.

Recycling labels are largely a myth.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who has helped companies manufacture products safely, efficiently, and in an environmentally best way, says, “The vast majority of recyclable labels on plastic packaging today are false.” Because the labels are misleading, a lot of the plastic you believe is recyclable actually isn’t. And companies are aware of that. 

So even if you’re dutifully segregating your trash at home, the truth is, because rules around packaging are lax, they all end up either getting buried or burned, regardless of your effort. 

“Globally, we recycle less than 10 percent of the plastic we produce,” says Dell. Corporations are just producing too much. “We simply cannot recycle our way out of all this stuff that they want us to buy.” The only solution? Make less plastic. Buy less plastic.

Hazardous e-waste gets shipped off… to countries with weaker economies.

Jim Puckett, the James Bond of waste, places a tracker on electronic waste to find out what happens to these devices at the end of life. What he learns is that e-waste that’s supposed to end up with a recycler is usually shipped abroad to countries like Thailand, where they are dismantled by hand at the risk of workers’ health and the environment. 

Instead of being recycled and disposed of safely, they are exploiting countries with weaker economies. E-waste is toxic and hazardous. It contains lead, mercury, heavy metals, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants. “Done properly would cost a lot of money to do so someone else pays with their health.”

The clothes you donated probably ended up on a beach.

If you’ve ever donated old clothes to a retail store in exchange for 15 percent off your next purchase, chances are the clothes you donated did not end up where you intended them to end up. 

Fashion designer Chloe Asaam is the program manager for OR Foundation, which aims to address fast-fashion waste in Ghana. In the documentary, she shares that the clothes that are sent to Ghana as charity end up littering the beaches because the volume of clothes being sent to their country is more than what the people will ever need. “There was just too much clothing coming in.” 

The old sneakers that you gave away for donation? They most likely got dumped in a desert in Chile, in a mountain of discarded fast-fashion clothes so massive, it’s visible from space.

“When we throw away, we actually don’t throw it away. ‘Away’ doesn’t exist. It ends up somewhere else on this planet.” —Paul Polman

“Away” is a real place on Earth.

One of the more poignant quotes from Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy comes from Paul Polman, Unilever CEO from 2009 to 2019, “When we throw away, we actually don’t throw it away. ‘Away’ doesn’t exist. It ends up somewhere else on this planet Earth.”

When we give away, when we throw away, they don’t magically disappear. They end up in landfills across the globe, and they don’t stay there. Toxins from e-waste leach out and microplastics from polyester clothes are released into our waters and end up in the food we eat. And all of this is making the planet sick and is making us sick.

The onus should be on the corporations and businesses. But the truth is, they are all about profits. Nirav Patel reveals that designers and engineers do not think about the end of life of the devices they create. Companies largely wash their hands off the responsibility for where the products end up once they’re disposed of.  

So as consumers, we need to do our part. You don’t need the latest phone model if the one you have is still working perfectly. And if it’s not, consider finding a reputable repair shop that can fix it for you. Make it a personal challenge to make your phone last longer than its best-by date. If Chris “Captain America” Evans can make do with an iPhone 6s for seven years, so can you. 

Review your cart and edit it before checking out. Maren Costa recommends keeping items on your cart for a month, and if you still want to buy it after waiting that long, then maybe it’s something worth buying. 

Avoid fast fashion if you can, and do not be a slave to trends. No, you do not need to wear the latest cut of jeans that will be out of fashion before the year even ends. Yes, you have enough pairs of sneakers in your collection. No, you don’t need to get a new purse. 

Do you know what’s worth buying into? The planet and your health. Add to cart. Check out.

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