The Truth About Amazon review – a punters' guide to the retail giant's jungle

This Supershoppers special takes two Amazon-devoted families on an eye-opening tour of the retailers' tactics - with mixed results

I forget how much of an unbearable metropolitan elitist I am sometimes. When I see a programme called The Truth About Amazon, I automatically think it's going to be an excoriating investigation into some of the alleged abuses of its workers. These are so many that, taken together, they would amount to something remarkably close to servitude, even before the new claims of failures to protect its people (or provide such things as hazard pay) started since the pandemic began. Or its viciously anti-union stance, or how a company making 11bn a year pays less tax than a pet hamster, or whether the invisible hand of the market is really enough to keep western capitalism from ultimately destroying us all ...

You get, I'm sure, the idea. In fact, last night's The Truth About Amazon on Channel 4, presented by Sabrina Grant and Helen Skelton, was a Supershoppers special, attacking it from that programme's usual consumer rights perspective. This will probably do at least as much to problematise punters' immediate relationship with the retail giant-of-giants as would another handwringing article about its tentacular reach into more and more aspects of our lives. Not to mention Jeff Bezos's likely ultimate plan to strangle us all in our beds as we sleep and turn our bodies into fuel for his behemoth once it gains sentience.