Admittedly, I am a guy who generally dreads the thought of plodding through a shopping mall on any day of the year, but to me the encroachment of Black Friday into Thanksgiving evening seems not only insane but also disturbingly unpatriotic. It was bad enough when it became the norm for people to show up in the middle of the night in order to be near the front of the line when store doors swung open early on the morn after Thanksgiving. Every time I heard about the herd of shoppers being culled as someone got trampled or sent to the hospital after a fight over a Tickle Me Elmo, I felt justified in my smugness and disdain of this retail frenzy. If that is how the rabble wanted to spend their time and money, so be it…. Over the years, though, retailers have pushed the starting time for this mad dash earlier and earlier until now it is bumping up against the slicing of the pumpkin pie at the Thanksgiving dinner table. This does not seem right.
The concept of Black Friday escapes me, but then I’m the person who hates crowds with a passion. The crowds that make Black Friday what it is seem to be the very definition of my own personal Hell. The idea that people would queue up in the middle of the night- sometimes 2-3 days in advance is to me ridiculous, the height of the absurd acquisitiveness that makes American the crass, materialistic place it all too frequently can be.
I’m not a Christian, and I don’t believe in God, so I don’t celebrate Christmas for its original reason. Many Americans do, though, even as they get caught up in the frenzy that is Black Friday. I get the idea of wanting to get your Christmas shopping out of the way, and there’s something to be said for finishing early and watching the madding crowds work themselves into a lather. Does one really need to be camped outside a Target or WalMart on Thanksgiving Day in order to make that happen?
The reality is that Christmas isn’t about the birth of Jesus Christ, and it hasn’t been for a very long time. No, Christmas is the retail sector’s gift to itself, an artificially created and obsessively nurtured way to drive up sales (Por ejemplo, Target spends four months planning for Black Friday). Yes, I suppose it’s good for the economy. I get that. I’d feel better about it if the people working at big box retailers actually shared in some of the bounty. Most Americans neither know nor particularly care that the person helping you find that 84” TV that’s supposedly on sale is making perhaps $9/hr. (When did we as consumers begin to see the interests of workers as antithetical to our own…as if many of us aren’t workers in different incarnations?)
For too many, Christmas is about being exploited as they struggled to make ends meet while working for an employer that won’t give them enough hours to make ends meet so they don’t have to provide health care. The “part-timing” of American workers displays a cruel and heartless disregard for those who make the hundreds of billions of dollars in profits possible. (Target’s CEO made $24 million last year; the starting wage for new store employees is $9/hr. I’ll let you judge the fairness of that equation.)
I hope that you’ll enjoy your Christmas and it becomes everything you desire. My aspiration is that you’ll think of those being exploited and mistreated by greedy big box retailers who pay their senior executives millions while refusing to pay their rank and file employees even the barest hint of a living wage.
