Christmas shopping starts in earnest this week. Spurred on by hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising, more than one hundred and fifty million Americans will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ by engaging in a mindless, debt-building, four-week frenzy of consumerism.
They will shop every day from here to Christmas. And every day from here to Christmas, experts will extract some giant rectal thermometer from the sphincter of the economy, read the retail sales numbers, and announce them to a hovering Wall Street.
Then Wall Street will pronounce the numbers, "Not good enough," and go to the whip to spur the offending retailers on. And offending retailers will lower prices in an effort to amp the Christmas shopping frenzy up.
And for what? So you can give that dork of a brother-in-law some object made in China? Rest assured that, whatever you choose to give him, your brother-in-law will still be a dork after you've given it to him.
It might be different if retailers didn't just phone Christmas in these days. But no.
For retailers, fleecing America at Christmas has become a birthright. Like the Bush family's birthright to the presidency. And, like a Bush presidency, Christmas has acquired meaningless form and shed substance at an alarmingly accelerating rate lately.
For retailers, it's down to clichรฉ advertising (kids in scarves, sweaters and stocking caps, snowflakes, trees, lights, etc.) in-store signage, cheap seasonal help, and Christmas music over the PA system.
Never mind the real meaning of Christmas. They can't even get the real meaning of Christmas retail right.
They're telling us, "It's Christmas. Buy this crap." That's all.
Recently, the Fed dropped interest rates and released $40 billion in an effort to coax a few more RPMs out of the sputtering V-8 of the American economy. No doubt, they had the housing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis in mind.
But you've got to believe the Fed was sending the rest of us another message, too. The message says, "It's Christmas. Buy this crap."
