The Wrong Amazon is Burning

Black Friday, a commercial tradition that Americans created to mark the official beginning of the holiday shopping season. Every year, before their thanksgiving turkey has even been given the chance to get cold, millions of Americans flock to local malls and outlets to take advantage of the Black Friday sales. This means that for the past decade or so, Americans have also taken to their laptops and phones to shop holiday deals for their loved ones online. This shift has even given rise to Cyber Monday, the digital counterpart to Black Friday. E-commerce giants like Amazon have transformed Black Friday into a global cyber event, with sales now stretching across the weekend and spilling into weeks of pre-holiday discounts. What began as a uniquely American tradition has since spread to countries worldwide.

This weekend has transformed into a powerful symbol of the increasing globalization of over-consumption, the fast fashion industry’s environmental and social impacts, and the dominance of the multi-billion dollar companies driving this tradition. These companies, like Amazon, thrive on the relentless push for hyper-discounts and convenience, which often come at the expense of fair labor practices, sustainable production, and ethical consumption.

As the shopping frenzy intensifies, so does the scrutiny of these practices, prompting activist movements like the 2019 Make Amazon Pay campaign. This campaign highlighted the need for accountability in how major corporations impact workers, local communities, and the planet. By taking advantage of the global spotlight on Black Friday, activists aimed to shine light on the unspoken realities of what it takes to work at that level of efficiency at the scale in which Amazon does. For instance, in July 2024, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, who have had an ongoing open investigation on Amazon and its warehouse conditions, made the companies internal data public for the first time, highlighting that at the time of the 2019 Make Amazon Pay campaign, injuries reported to the Occupational Safety and Health administration, OSHA, were more than double the average of the US warehousing and storage industry. Still, Amazon’s total injury rate in 2024 on days like amazon prime day, was just under 45 per 100 workers.

Activists in Berlin, Germany took a uniquely artistic approach to spreading the message of the Make Amazon Pay campaign. On Black Friday 2019, the phrase “The Wrong Amazon is Burning” was projected onto the company’s Berlin headquarters, the Amazon Tower. This projection served as both a protest and an art piece, connecting the environmental destruction of the Amazon rainforest, exacerbated by overconsumption and unsustainable supply chains, to Amazon’s unethical corporate practices. By using the side of Amazon’s own headquarters and projecting this edgy slogan, traction was caught, reaching social media users worldwide.

The choice of the phrase seems deliberate in its irony, pointing at how consumerism fuels environmental destruction while the Amazon rainforest, often dubbed “the lungs of the planet,” suffers devastating deforestation. This artistic act shed light on the hidden costs of the shopping trends surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday, urging people to reconsider their consumption habits and demand ethical practices from corporations.

This initiative was a direct calling out of corporations, for, Amazon may be one of the most profitable companies in the world, but at whose expense?