On this blue Monday following Black Friday, can anyone remember Thursday? Thanksgiving, once America's holiday of gratitude and family solidarity, has become the staging area for Christmas shopping. It is no longer just the day after Thanksgiving -- Black Friday (as in "in the black, or profitable") -- that is devoted to consumerism, but Thanksgiving Day itself, on which more and more stores are now staying open for pre-Black Friday sales. Call it gray Thursday.
America's retail industry, now indistinguishable from its marketing industry, sees in every blank space a billboard, in every suburban meadow, a mall, in every screen -- big or small -- a banner ad. And in every 'non-working' holiday, a time for more shopping. The Thanksgiving weekend comprises four non-working days: that's ninety-six hours available for non-stop shopping. Ditto for Halloween, Ramadan, Christmas, you name it -- the "holy days" are now all shopoholy days. And whose fault is that?
I had a half dozen calls from radio and TV stations over this long shopping weekend asking me to talk about why consumers are so hungry to shop, why housewives were camping out at 3 AM Friday morning to make the 4 AM opening of mega-stores like Target. The assumption of the reporters who called was that Black Friday was a demand side phenomenon -- moms deciding there wasn't enough time in the day for all the shopping they wanted to do, dads insisting that stores stay open on Thanksgiving and open again midnight on Black Friday 'cause they just couldn't get enough of those bargains, kids leaping from bed at midnight as if they'd spotted Peter Pan in the window and shouting "let's go shopping!"
See, the point seems to be, the retail industry is just saying -- after all, this is its mantra -- we're just giving people what they want.
Well not quite: Americans like to shop, but they also like to pray, read, play, talk, make art, make love, take walks, and spend time munching turkey with loved ones. They like to shop but not 24/7. The shopping fanaticism we see on Black Friday, and throughout the year, is a supply side phenomenon: the result of corporations "pushing" not consumers "pulling."
That's why marketing and advertising are capitalism's main industries today, why they expend a quarter of a trillion every year to get people to "want" all the stuff they sell. It's why they target children and encourage shopaholism (a serious problem for more than 20 million Americans who regularly go shopping without a particular purchase in mind).
Where capitalism once produced goods and services to meet real needs and wants, today it produces needs and wants to sell all the goods, wanted or not, it must sell to stay in business. Real needs (clean water in the third world) go wanting, while manufactured needs (bottled water) are pushed on first world consumers who can get free clean water from their taps.
So Black Friday is no anomaly; it is consumer capitalism incarnate. It is not a compliant response by polite retailers to consumer demand, it is part of a massive world-wide campaign to instigate and sustain consumer demand beyond any reasonable definition of need or want. To satisfy shareholders not citizens.
Our hyper-consumerism is actually consuming us (sub-prime mortgage anyone?) As the subtitle to my book Consumed argues, it is "corrupting children, infantilizing adults and swallowing citizens whole."
It's time we understand that Black Friday is not something we do; it something being done to us. And comprehend that, left to the marketplace, Black Friday will eat Thursday as well and annihilate what is left of Thanksgiving and the American spirit it represents.