Amazon has a strange habit of focusing its Christmas ads on regular working stiffs of the sort it usually conscripts into overscheduled and underunionised labour. In this year’s iteration a sad-eyed janitor sings forlornly to himself as he works in a theatre. “With our brothers and our sisters from many far-off lands, there is power in a union,” he sings.
Only joking. He sings: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
” This song is vague in its reading of cause and effect. It certainly fails to associate the absence of love with the dominance of unregulated capital. Consequently, when the melancholy janitor is overheard crooning by colleagues, they are inspired not to organise their labour in defiance of a resource-hording elite but to organise a small concert at which he will perform for free and experience a fleeting moment of happiness before returning to his toil.
And so it is that he sings his song of unspecific longing in a spotlight on a stage while wearing a suit ordered from Amazon (not a local retailer) instead of at a picket line. His workmates are moved to tears, possibly because they know their wages will be docked for doing all this while technically at work. While shopping in John Lewis (a British department store, not a man) a woman wanders through a rack of clothes, Narnia-style, into scenes from her past.
It’s basically regression therapy. However, while in some ways she engages with .