The 49-minute documentary, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, is called The Great Amazon Heist. It seems to make a lot of noise in that country these days. We learn how Amazon allows and promotes the sale of the urine of its lorry drivers, marketed as an energy drink, on its Marketplace platform. I’ve watched it. It’s hilarious and infuriating.
This isn’t the first time that Oobah Butler, who directed the documentary, has pulled a prank. In 2017, Butler created a completely virtual restaurant from scratch — thus it never existed in real life — called The Shed at Dulwich, and which became the highest-rated restaurant in London on TripAdvisor. If you want to follow his lead, he wrote a book in 2019 about his art of manipulating social media algorithms, with a clear and simple title: How to Bullsh*t your Way to Number 1.
I had already heard about Amazon banning toilet breaks for its employees, for efficiency reasons of course. It can be read in this 2018 article: Pee break: Amazon admits that its employees urinate in bottles. Apparently the situation has hardly changed since then. It’s actually worse. If an Amazon driver gets caught with a bottle of urine in their vehicle they’ll receive a penalty. In the documentary, Butler goes to the multinational’s distribution centre in Coventry, England, collects the precious yellow liquid, bottles it into an energy drink with a bright and shiny yellow label, which he calls Release Energy. The rest is just a matter of marketing on Amazon’s own platform, a skill that Butler masters, as mentioned above. He managed to give his Release Energy the best reviews in the entire section where it was sold, without actually selling a single bottle.
We also learn that the workers at the Coventry centre tried to unionise. They won almost 50% support from the workforce, the legal threshold for forming what would have been Amazon’s first union in Europe. What was Amazon’s counter-attack? Hire hundreds of people, paid to do nothing, so that the 50% threshold is never reached.
The most infuriating scene is undoubtedly the one where we see Butler’s nieces, aged 4 and 6, using Alexa (you know, the funny box you install in your home that lets you shop by voice commands and close the deal by saying “Buy now!”) to order all sorts of kid-friendly products like switchblade knives and rat poison. No age verification from Amazon is carried out at any stage of the process, not even during home delivery. The world’s billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, are often admired as geniuses. Rhetorical question: In what universe does the CEO of a company that allows children to order rat poison have a higher IQ than that of a serial killer?
It all sounds very sad and dry, but the film is super punchy and very entertaining. Must be seen. But by the way… Channel 4 geoblocks IP addresses outside the UK, so how was I able to watch it? I came across it by chance on the Internet. I was lucky, I suppose. If you email or DM me, maybe I can help you too to be lucky, semicolon closing parenthesis.
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