Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon" energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss (20 Oct 2023)

[usonian]

From Cory Doctorow, https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/

Not from The Onion.

For a brief time this year, the bestselling "bitter lemon drink" on Amazon was "Release Energy," which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by Catfish UK prankster Oobah Butler in a stunt for a new Channel 4 doc, "The Great Amazon Heist":

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-amazon-heist (have to sign in to play ... )

Collecting driver piss is surprisingly easy. Amazon, you see, puts its drivers on a quota that makes it impossible for them to drive safely, park conscientiously, or, indeed, fulfill their basic human biological needs. Amazon has long waged war on its employees' kidneys, marking down warehouse workers for "time off task" when they visit the toilets.

...

The Release Energy stunt shows where Amazon's priorities are. Not only did Release Energy get listed on Amazon without any quality checks, the company actually nudged it into a category where it was more likely to be consumed by a person. The only notice the company took of Release Energy was in its logistics and manufacturing department – the part of the business that extracts the monopoly rents at issue in the FTC case – which tracked Butler down in order to sell him these services.

...

In Butler's documentary, (FTC Chair) Khan's hypothesis is thoroughly validated: here's a company extracting hundreds of billions from merchants who raise prices to compensate, and those monopoly rents are "invested" in union-busting and countermeasures against investigative journalists, while the tools to keep you from accidentally getting a bottle of piss in the mail are laughably primitive.

Lots more at the link.
I thought of cross posting to the labor group. Steve?

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Talking of which: Tsingtao responds to viral video showing a Chinese beer worker urinating into a tank

Chinese beer maker Tsingtao Brewery said Monday that it had contacted authorities about a viral video showing a staff member urinating into one of its tanks, and that an investigation was underway.

The video — which has received ten of millions of views since emerging Thursday on social media site Weibo — shows a uniformed man climbing over a high wall and onto the container before urinating in it.

Tsingtao, China’s second largest brewer, said in a statement that the incident had been reported at the “first opportunity.”

It added that the batch of malt had been sealed off from use.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/23/tsingtao-responds-to-viral-video-of-beer-worker-urinating-into-a-tank.html

[usonian]

2. What would we do without the internet?

I know!

BE HAPPY!



And while I was searching for a photo to post, I noted that some 90% of them were of women and kids.
Hmmmm.