SNL’s Roast of Amazon’s “Grab and Go” Stores Reveals a Sad Truth About Shopping in America

“Oh, so you want me to take just something and walk out? Nah, son.”

YouTube/Saturday Night Live

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The best comedy, in my opinion, is the stuff that reveals larger truths about society. As the late British actor Peter Ustinov once said, “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”

A new skit from Saturday Night Live—a spoof commercial featuring The Batman actor and absolute goddess Zoë Kravitz—does exactly that. The skit opens with a white, male character (James Austin Johnson), wearing a signature tech bro flannel and puffy vest, entering an Amazon Go store, one of the company’s newish brick-and-mortar businesses which allow customers to purchase items by scanning an app upon entry. “No lines, no checkouts,” a narrator voices over. “No problem,” a white woman dressed in athleisurewear (Chloe Fineman), says to the camera as she exits the store. “At an Amazon Go store,” the narration continues, “you can walk in, grab what you want, put it in your bag, and just go.”

Then, the skit takes a turn. The commercial cuts to a Black customer, portrayed by SNL legend Kenan Thompson, who says, “Oh so you want me to just take something and walk out? Nah son,” he says, an implied reference to the racial bias Black and brown shoppers face in the United States.

Similarly, Kravitz’s character, shopping with a white partner (Andrew Dismukes), spots her “favorite brand of kombucha” on the shelf—but can’t bring herself to pick it up for what we can assume is a similar reason. “Can you grab it?” she asks him. “Me? What? No, just grab it,” he replies. The two bicker until he finally grabs the bottle and says, “I’m learning.”

Another Black shopper, played by Chris Redd, takes a turkey club sandwich from off the shelf, but changes his mind about it and puts it back. “I am putting the sandwich back y’all,” he says loudly. “I have decided to get a different sandwich today.” The penultimate scene cuts back to Redd saying frantically, “Alexa, search Amazon Go store Black man trapped.”

Watch it for yourself:

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate