How long is Black Friday? A day? A weekend? A week?
Now that American retailers have freed themselves from the
taboo against shopping on Thanksgiving, Black Friday can mean anything one
likes. With more and more stores offering discounts and revving up advertising
right after Halloween, the holiday shopping season threatens to consume the
entire fall, much as the harvest, processing and storage of the crops used to
do before the industrial revolution. Instead of sickles, threshers and canning equipment,
we wield credit cards and smart phones.
I wonder how traditionalists feel now that Black Friday
sales begin the Monday before Thanksgiving and earlier? Do they miss the
week-long anticipation of a one-day bacchanalia of shopping bargains and
surging crowds? Do they sob in dismay as presales drain the true meaning out of
Black Friday—the official kickoff to a month-long potlatch of buying and consumption?
Or do they embrace the greater opportunity for celebration, as the de facto
number of shopping days swells? Perhaps some even welcome the expansion of
Black Friday, as it swallows Thanksgiving and diminishes the imperatives of
that competing holiday of an older culture. After all, why should a family meal
impede the imperatives of consumer culture?
All facetiousness aside, I find it fascinating to see how
different vendors are approaching the start of the holiday shopping season now
that the rigidity in start date imposed by the obligations of celebrating
Thanksgiving has eroded. I applaud the many national retailers such as Costco,
Marshall’s, Barnes & Noble, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom’s and Burlington Coat
Factory who are staying closed on Thanksgiving. I wonder if they ran the
numbers and realized that keeping the doors closed for Thanksgiving does not
cost them any overall sales. I’m sure they have happier employees, and happier
employees are usually more productive.
Walmart has opened its doors on Thanksgiving for almost 25
years now. It currently intends to treat Black Friday like an invasion—phasing
in different sales events as if they were deploying tank divisions to breach a
border at several points. At the chime of midnight on Thanksgiving, Walmart
starts a blitzkrieg of sales on its website. While Walmart will have its doors
opened all day Thanksgiving, it will offer a round of special sales at 6:00 pm
and another at 8:00 pm. Then comes the main event—the traditional 6:00 am Black
Friday opening with its own set of special sales.
Walmart, by the way, is far from the only retailer to
desecrate Thanksgiving. Macy’s, Kmart, Sears, Penney, Target, Kohl’s and Best
Buy are just a few of the many national retailers who think they can make extra
bucks by getting a head start on the holiday shopping season.
For my household, Black Friday week started when the mail
came today, and we saw the New York
magazine holiday gift guide—551 gift suggestions ranging in costs from one
penny to $4 million, virtually all of which are completely frivolous and
inessential. Some of the more conspicuously useless of the gifts under $50
include “Yoga Joes (G.I. Joes doing Yoga instead of waging war), an evil-eye
key chain, a bottle of water from the so-called fountain of youth, Japanese
KitKat bars, socks from the tailor who supplies the pope and a banana slicer.
Unlike the traditional magazine gift guide, the New York guide is an interactive tool.
All you have to do is download a free app and then scan the image of the
products you want to buy by holding “the
smartphone steady 4-6” away from the printed page and let your camera focus
until you hear a chime,” as a full-page ad in the publications tells us.
The third step—since it’s as easy as one, two, three, like everything else in
the dreamland called American commerce—is to buy the items from the e-commerce
page.
We somehow finagled a year’s free subscription to New York, but some people are actually
paying money to get this special issue, which conveniently arrived on the first
day of the new American holiday of Black Friday Week.
I must have somehow become an obstinate old codger. I
proclaim the virtues of diversity all the time, and yet the diversity in Black
Friday celebration that we currently have by the various national churches of
commerce such as Walmart, Macy’s and Costco leaves me uneasy. I find it
unseemly that in generating Black Friday Week we are naming a week after a day.
I also wonder what meaning there can be left in the shared traditions of
camping out overnight, pushing together to break through a logjam of people and
sending different family members with lists to different departments or stores—all
the fun stuff we associate with Black Friday and remember from our
childhood—all of it must lose some meaning knowing that you could have picked
up the same hand-held computer or hot toy earlier in the week. I should instead
marvel at the fact that in the United States, you have so many options for
buying meaningless crap—that is provided, you have the money.
LOL or COL (crying out loud).
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