Explosive documentation: Amazon eats us skin and hair

In a Beijing supermarket, a young Chinese woman scans every single product that she puts in her shopping cart.

She wants to know where the lettuce comes from, where it was grown, and whether, as the label promises, it is really organic.

Without her cell phone, the immaculately styled woman would be lost shopping.

The scene takes place in the Arte documentary "Discontinued model supermarket?" (Directed by Rémi Delescluse), which provides insights into the world of the rapidly changing grocery store.

While cashiers are still the rule in this country, the term smart seems to come from a distant world and bulky shopping carts are maneuvered through the aisles of Rewe, Aldi, Lidl and Edeka, digitization is conquering the supermarket in China and America.

Hyper-connected, wealthy customers

JD.com, number two in China's online mail order business behind Alibaba, is ceaselessly expanding its power in the Middle Kingdom. The target group for their "7 Fresh" supermarkets: hyper-connected, wealthy customers. The rate of online orders is already fifty percent. Deliveries are made via the autonomously driving electric vehicle, which can drive several customers one after the other. If you don't shy away from going to the supermarket, but don't feel like roasting your steak pink yourself at home, you can simply let the cook service take care of it on site.

In America, the biggest player is known to be Amazon, the insatiable company that has set out to supply its customers with all important (and unimportant) goods and to provide maximum screening.

In 2017, Jeff Bezos rocked the food industry with the $ 13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods supermarket chain.

A year earlier, Amazon had opened the first store equipped with just-walk-out technology in Seattle, which attracts customers with the promise of efficiency.

Because the shopping cart equipped with sensors and the smart shelves save modern people, who always feel rushed, from waiting at the checkout.

An app is used to debit the price for the purchase.

Amazon wants to know everything about us

There are now 28 such stores in America, with Brittain Laid, former Amazon strategy consultant, assuming that the Internet giant will have a network of up to 3,000 supermarkets by 2030. But no app quantifies the price that the consumer actually pays. Stacy Mitchell, market researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, sums it up: “Amazon wants to know as much as possible about us. What we eat and how we buy groceries reveals a lot. "

When it comes to the careless handling of one's own, sometimes intimate, data, one of the most popular and naive statements is: “I have nothing to hide.” That every online purchase, every prescription drug, every bottle of wine and bag of chips put in the smart shopping cart comes with it countless other personal data is combined, is being displaced. But nobody can say today which information stored somewhere will close doors tomorrow.

The weaker first half of the Arte documentation focuses on the French retail group Carrefour and its brutal, sometimes blackmailing practices against franchisees and suppliers who are forced to make increasingly painful price concessions because their products are otherwise simply out of the range. Even Nestlé, considered inviolable, is falling to its knees after Carrefour and other European companies have 163 Nestlé products disappear from several thousand stores. A former legal advisor from Carrefour speaks of "devastating effects" on the whole system.

In China, the JD.com slogan is to act as independently of annoying partners as possible.

The giant therefore grows vegetables in nutrient-rich liquid, for example, without soil, as traditional agriculture is too inefficient and expensive.

The initial investment in the cultivation, which is monitored by a few white-coated workers, is extremely expensive, but it pays off many times over.

In March Amazon opened its first cash-free supermarket equipped with numerous cameras under the name “Amazon Fresh” in London.

It is only a matter of time before more branches will follow across Europe.

There is no question, however, that Amazon will intensify its data collection mania, because there are enough willing customers after all.

The documentation

runs on Tuesday, 8.15 p.m., at Arte.