Beginning with the annually observed “Black Friday” sales panic, the Holiday Season in the American tradition is generally recognized to run from the day after Thanksgiving till the anticlimactic sales moratorium of December 25th. Black Friday is the gunshot start of a month-long consumerist frenzy marked by broken bones, scattered bodies, and impoverishing excess. Christmas itself has become really nothing more than a cease-fire. The “true spirit” of the Holidays has long been best reflected in Black Friday. This is the day in which celebrants are free to abandon any individual sense of decency and responsibility to become a part of the larger shopping mob. Year by year the brutality grows more severe, earlier and earlier consumers mindlessly congeal into riotous hordes outside major retail outlets during the predawn hours preparing their disorganized assaults with savage mania.
Injuries are to be expected and deaths are not out of the question.
It is widely believed that “Black Friday” earned its name to signify the day of the year in which many retail businesses find their revenue shifting to profit, from ‘in the red’ to ‘in the black’. In fact, it appears the term originated from the Philadelphia Police in response to the dark day’s traffic congestion and overall war-zone ambiance.
In an attempt to counter the sinking debasement, activists have attempted to re-fashion the day after Thanksgiving as an annual “Buy Nothing Day”, a time to reflect upon what we truly value removed from “the consumer treadmill”. This message has proven altogether too radical for network television stations who denied air-time to an Adbusters Buy Nothing Day campaign. CBS saw in it nothing short of treason, stating, "This commercial is in opposition to the current economic policy of the United States." In 2000, the Guardian reported, “Only CNN agreed to run the commercial after being told that a refusal would lead to an embarrassing story in the Wall Street Journal. This year the network agreed to run the ad [...] only to have an apparent change of heart.”
To recap some publicised recent Black Friday highlights:
- Tragedy occurred in 2008 at a Wal-Mart in Long Island when marching morons rolled over a part-time employee -- a certainly unwilling participant in the day’s stupidity -- who had the bad luck of being tasked with the unlocking the store doors at 5am. Disgustingly, the crowd reportedly objected to clearing the premises in response to the man’s death. The event resulted in a $7000 dollar federal fine gently rested upon the wrist of the multi-billion dollar company for “inadequate crowd management”. The minor fine was an outrage to Wal-Mart who contested it.
- That same year, two men killed each other in a Toys R Us shoot-out, a jostled pregnant shopper miscarried, and combating consumers in Racine, WI fell upon each other struggling to secure flatscreen televisions, smashing each other and many of the TVs in the process.
- One would have hoped that in 2006 there would have been a prison sentence given to whoever had the maliciously moronic idea of dropping 500 gift certificate filled balloons from the ceiling at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrence, CA, where the ensuing melee injured 10 and sent one old woman to the hospital.
- In 2009, a typical group of mindless beasts in their natural habitat -- Wal-Mart -- began tearing into shrink wrapped items in a warring frenzy. The store was temporarily closed in an attempt to restore order. This brought the mob to a riot. They began beating on doors and windows from the outside while others tried to force their way in from the gardening area.
- Last year, CNN reported on the trampling of a man in Buffalo, NY. There was nothing unusual about the event, in fact the predictability of the occurrence brought the news cameras to the store in advance. The foot-pummeled fool “told WIVB that he was pinned against a metal door support and was shoved to the ground. Shoppers went over him until staff pulled him to safety. ‘At that moment I was thinking I don't want to die here on the ground,’ he said.”
As part of the herd himself, one may well doubt that this man would have felt equal sympathy for somebody else, some hapless victim underfoot, had the roles been reversed.
And these reports are but a few culled from the archives. Disgracefully typical is the “holiday spirit” that finds housewives and businessmen alike making kamikaze death runs toward open parking spaces, clawing through one another to reach marked-down merchandise.
The beginning of the Christmas season has come to mean a relinquishing of all pretenses of human dignity in the name of the better deal. It is a time in which my most misanthropic prejudices seem most justified, and I can’t help but build a loathsome composite of the typical Black Friday shopper: a self-entitled slob unmoved, and even outraged, by political protest, but fully willing to “occupy” a parking lot overnight to join a feral predawn riot.
Such is the shame of these mobs that each individual who participates prefers to imagine him or herself somehow removed from the wild inhumanity of it. The only true dignity is in non-participation. All politics aside, self-respect and basic decorum should by now dictate the imperative of recognizing Black Friday as a day in which we buy nothing.
Alas, appeals to reason, propriety, even compunction are no match for the Christmas Spirit. Resigned to the inevitable brutality of the ritual stampedes that will take place the morning after Thanksgiving, I find myself hoping that at least the right people will get hurt. Considering the well-established modern history of Black Friday mob malice, and the fact that no participant can claim unwitting contribution... I must conclude all participants are guilty. There is no point in trying to discriminate by age, gender, or presumed level of need...
They all deserve to get hurt.
(By the way -- several Boston retailers will be opening their doors early in the wee hours following Thanksgiving Day. I mention this in hopes of satisfying my local requirements for this piece, and as a Team Player reporting upon this timely topic...)
Comments