Have you ever found yourself falling for Ms/Mr Wrong, but you know you're going to do it anyway? You just know it's going to turn out all wrong for you. That's a tell-tail sign: envisioning an end. When you fall for Mr/Ms Right, you don't envision an end.
It looks to me like we are collectively falling for Black Friday and it isn't going to be easy to break it off. It's going to end badly, but we seem to want it so much. Why? Possibly because every media hack in the country, and there are a lot of them, are working us into a frenzy. These might be the same folks who told us about those great mortgages with near-zero interest, no down payments and no silly job requirement.
Have you asked yourselves how Black Friday got here? We awoke one morning still feeling full from a Thanksgiving dinner and with a mild headache to find Black Friday hanging in the sky like one of those huge Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons in the form of a vulture. " This is not my holiday!" the Talking Heads might have sung.
Suddenly, whenever you turn on a TV (usually a mistake anyway) and the car radio, some nitwit is ranting about bargains all over town. In Seattle,which I visited this past Thanksgiving, there was a radio show devoted to Black Friday shopping tips and a Shopping Parade downtown. Disclosure: yes, I did shop. I bought a Christmas present for my wife at Revival, Leah Steen's fine shop in the Capitol Hill district, $109, and I would do it all over again.
Black Friday. Does that sound like a day on which something really good is going to happen? What is this thing about colors all of a sudden, like Red and Blue states. I still can't remember which ones are Democratic and which Republican, although TV Talking /heads and newspapers take it for granted that we all know. Who thinks up these things?
Black Friday. How could we be so stupid?
Retailers and their media agents seem to think that spending money we have and don't have is great for the economy. Maybe that's why retailing and media stocks are not such great buys: talk about dumb. An American spending $500 in a discount or department store is probably borrowing at least half of that and perhaps paying as much as 29.9% interest. This is the newest rate banks have invented for us after borrowing untold billions from us in order to "survive." Even these ingrates can't bring themselves to charge 30% interest. Yet.
That $500 bucks may go to protecting some $15 per hour jobs with few or no "benefits." Some of it may even go to places where the retailers are HQ'd, and some more may indeed find its way into the media itself in the form of advertising. But, let's get serious, if you're buying a lot of stuff, much of this dough is going to find its way to China. China is then going to lend it to our "government," so that they can spend way more than $500. Everyday is Black Friday for Congress and State Legislatures.
China. A person making $20 a day in China probably saves $10. A person making $20 an hour in the US, spends $28 per hour. Congress' new universal national healthcare is mostly made in China, since they will lend us the dough. I'm beginning to think that Black Friday is a Chinese idea. I'm going to check my Little Red Book.
Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday. We don't need to get in a frenzy about buying a book our aunt won't read or having to return another tie your sister gave you. We don't feel compelled to become interior horticulturalists or exterior expert electricians. We gather together to share a meal and accomplish the near impossible task of making a turkey taste delicious instead of like moistened copy-paper. Thanksgiving comes with a bonus for many of us: a Friday off to do anything we want. Why would we want to ruin such a good thing in favor of Black Friday?
If we have to have back-to-back national holidays in November, why can't we have Savings Day. Americans would be much better off if they saved that $500 or the $250 of it that they actually have. That is the only way to improve the economy, Pilgrims: the only way to cut debt, invest in decent schools, in other words, keep having something to celebrate on Thanksgiving.
Black Friday looks a lot to me like ThanksTaking and we should break off the relationship right now.
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