Even the gentlest programme about Amazon cannot help but function as a reminder that Jeff Bezos originally planned to called his creation Relentless.com – presumably until a brave and/or heavily stock-optioned colleague took him aside and murmured in his ear: “You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud, Jeff.”
The Truth About Amazon: Can You Trust It This Christmas? (Channel 4) is indeed a gentle programme, the last in a series of three gentle programmes about the giganticest of retail giants. Presented by Helen Skelton and Sabrina Grant, this outcropping of Channel 4’s consumer rights franchise, Supershoppers, eschews anything like a full-blooded excoriation of Bezos or his behemoth. Like the original, supposedly one-off, documentary earlier this year, the series prefers to mix little more than a hint of hard truth with copious amounts of soft soap.
This time, we travelled much familiar ground via the familiar means – an Amazon-dependent family, complete with innocent infant in fatherly lap, the better to gum on toys that may or may not be on the list of withdrawals required by the EU or which come from third-party sellers. One of the company’s former product safety monitors describes a process whereby parties only have to provide documentation for the first product they plan to sell. They are then allowed to sell anything else in the same subcategory without it. (In the programme, the company counters that “our proactive tools monitor for product safety concerns and scan 100s of millions of products in our store every few minutes”.)
The programme notes, with a degree of (I hope assumed) naivety, that even after earlier episodes of this flyspeck of a series the retailer that generates £1.6bn profit a month (and which basically therefore owns the greedy meatsacks who keep clicking on it to buy stuff) failed to purge itself of all bad practices and remodel itself after your friendly neighbourhood grocery store. At this point in 2020, I almost admire the chutzpah it takes to keep up even the veneer of a facade of a pretence at optimism that things can change, but keep it up Skelton and Grant valiantly do.Can you trust Amazon to serve you the best deals? Short answer – no. Longer answer – no, but here are some hacks you can use to defeat it, if by defeat you mean hand over fractionally less of your money to an omnivorous beast that captures almost a third of online sales in Britain, is ravaging the high street (at an accelerated rate since Covid hit), has highly questionable working practices, and pays around the same amount of tax as Baby McNeil.
As is now traditional, the scales fall from the forcibly educated family’s eyes and they murmur that they are “a bit disappointed” to find that Amazon does not have their best interests at heart, agree that it “should be better” and accept that a former Amazon product safety and compliance officer’s opinion that the company sells too much to be effectively policed is “quite scary”.
With earlier editions, it was easier to make the argument that this kind of softly-softly/sugared pill approach to the subject – acknowledging the appeal of Amazon to the average shopper and sowing the seeds of mistrust rather than screaming in people’s faces – was a reasonable one. Now, as Amazon’s profits during the pandemic climb by 40% and its stranglehold over our lives tightens more rapidly than anyone had foreseen, gradual, organic enlightenment feels like a luxury we cannot afford any more – even if we get it at a discount from the Amazon warehouse because the packaging is dented.
The programme’s bait-and-switch rhythm is beginning to feel slightly hallucinatory. You detail the concerns about safety and the breaches you have found, you interview small businesses who have to spend tens of thousands of pounds protecting their intellectual property from counterfeiters against whom Amazon’s own supposedly dedicated crime unit largely fails to act – and then provide tips for uncovering the best bargains? Why? Why undo the progress you presumably hope to have made by proffering solutions to so many of the drawbacks outlined, often precisely the drawbacks that – hitting the wallet rather than the conscience – might best keep people away?
Presumably it is so they don’t frighten their own punters away. But, again, we are heading for dereliction-of-duty territory. It is, unavoidably, time to frighten punters. Time to drill deeper, confront truths and set them before us, however unpalatable. Time to talk about tax, monopolies, supine governments and workers’ rights. Time to say the quiet part out loud. Otherwise – well. He wanted to call it Relentless.com.
