Wednesday, May 7, 2025

The Truth About Amazon review – slick consumer show avoids the unpalatable questions

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Surely, if there were a time to put the boot into the retail giant, it’s now. Instead, Channel 4 pulls its punches, with festive tips for navigating Jeff Bezos’s empire

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.

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