Tonight I came across this video of shoppers stampeding into a mall early on the morning of Black Friday. It starts out tame, but it gets worse. Embarassingly worse.
I'm not anti-consumer by a long shot. I buy stuff around the holidays, some things for myself and some for others. I didn't take part in "buy nothing day" or any of the other boycotts surrounding Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. I have no qualms with the notion of a holiday shopping season, aside from a general malaise at the fact that the holidays themselves are all about corporate profits nowadays.
But I honestly don't get it... What compels people to wait in lines like this, flooding into a mall screaming and shouting and whooping and hollering at oh-dark-thirty the day after Thanksgiving? Is it the allure of saving 20% on a loss-leader item that brings them into the store, only to leave several hundred dollars in debt after picking up a few more overpriced gifts? Is it the idea of being the first on the block to have a specific product? Is it about some repressed desire for physical competition, Full Contact Shopping style? The way this crowd is yelping and stumbling over one another, it's easy to envision that someone had just opened a bread line in St. Petersburg - 20 years ago.
Maybe I've just settled into a happy and cynical medium. I'm old enough to have reached the point that there is no killer, must-have item on my list at Christmas time; in fact I no longer have any answer to the ageless question, "What do you want for Christmas?" Anything I wanted that badly, I've already bought. And I don't have any children, so I'm not compelled to capitulate to the increasing demands of today's kids. (Let's see, Mackenzie wants Hannah Montana tickets for $750, and Tristan wants a Wii which is gonna set me back $500... That's more than the mortgage, but no problem! I'll just max out another Mastercard!)
You want to give me something for Christmas? Make it something useful. Cash always works. How about a 12-roll-case of paper towels, or a few bags of cat food? Maybe some Svedka or a carton of Camels. Y'know, the same stuff that you could buy at any of a hundred different places, 364 other days of the year. If you waited in line, anywhere, at 4 in the morning on November 23rd to buy me something, I'm going to kick you in the fucking ass. Because you don't understand what giving is about.
