Unfulfilled

Season	s22
Episode	e09
Written By	Trey Parker
Production Code	2209
Original Air Date	2018-12-05

Episode Chronology

Previous
Buddha Box
Next
Bike Parade

Official Description

The citizens of South Park are enjoying all the perks of being a company town when the Amazon Fulfillment Center moves in. Everything is just swell until the contradictions inherent in capitalism threaten to bring down the entire system.

Full Description

South Park fourth grader Butters Stotch looks forward to the town's bike parade, where he hopes to win first prize. He purchases accessories to decorate his bicycle, but his father, Stephen Stotch, who recently began working at the Amazon fulfillment center as a boxer, worries that his familyâ€™s frequent purchases on that website are driving it deeper into debt. In addition, many local businesses have closed since the center opened, due to the public's preference for buying things online.

Stephen's co-worker, Josh Carter, is accidentally grabbed by a sorting robot and compressed into a small package, which Amazon blames on "human error." This outrages the facility's boxers, who go on strike, shutting down the fulfillment center, and delaying the fulfillment of the public's orders. Members of the public form a counter-protest urging the boxers to return to work so that they can receive their purchases. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, appears at South Park City Hall. He complains about the strike to Mayor McDaniels, who had assured him that the town was the perfect location for the center. Angered that Amazon orders throughout Colorado are not being fulfilled, he threatens to close her Amazon Prime account if she does not help him get the strikers back to work. When the company closes the strikers' Prime accounts, this creates a conflict for Stephen, who is torn between providing for his family and supporting his coworkers. Bezos and McDaniels observe this and other developments in the situation through citizens' Amazon Alexa smart speakers.

Butters' friends, Kenny McCormick, Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski, are initially dismissive of his interest in the bike parade. They reevaluate their view of it, however, upon encountering Larry Zewiski, the haughty winner of a previous parade, and see how popular his victory made him.

Desiring to win the prize as a group, they decide to enter four bikes into the parade under a single theme. When the strike impedes their ability to buy accessories for their bikes, however, they go to the local mall, but find it dilapidated and populated solely by mole people employees who cannot provide the diverse inventory that online merchants offer. Stan contacts Bezos, and says that the mall mole people will work as boxers at the fulfillment center if Bezos ships their bike parade-related purchases to them first.

Bezos agrees to this, and when the strikers learn of this, Josh decides to lead them to revolution.