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

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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:

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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