Running with the Herd
To Mock or Mingle with the Maddening Crowd?
by Dara Cerv
Picture this—wherever you are in America, it’s Thanksgiving weekend. Last night you grazed the dining room table—turkey glistened in its juices, stuffing exploding from its insides, cranberry sauce glowed ruby red, mashed potatoes were slathered in thick brown gravy—wine flowed and family members ate and ate. Perhaps you fell asleep in a chair, waking up only to gorge on a turkey sandwich at midnight, then dragged yourself to bed.
Now it’s Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving. Your alarm screams until you’re shook groggily from slumber, and you smile at the five pounds you’re sure you packed on last night. You think about taking a shuffle around the neighborhood in an attempt to burn it off. Then you think you’ll probably have leftovers for breakfast…
But what’s that?! Your alarm clock reads 4:15 a.m.! You shoot out of bed! Barely get wet in the shower! Skip the cold turkey entirely! Are out of the door by 4:45 a.m. to make the trip to the mall, the arcade, downtown, midtown, Walmart, K-mart—wherever it is you choose to drown yourself in official-first-shopping-day-of-the-holiday-season madness!
What is it about consuming a huge, calorie-laden dinner that brings out the frantic shopper in us? Well, if you take a quick step back, it’s exactly that—consuming. It seems to work inherently and in patterns. It was a dark day when toy companies realized that kids of an impressionable age are, well, really impressionable—they persist, even after encountering every possible plastic extension of a movie like Harry Potter, or Nintendo’s endless array of gaming systems and games (see Star Wars XXII: Attack of the Clones that Came Back Again to Kill Us Again, Part 3). From day one we’re brought up to eat it up, and eat it up we do, especially now that we’re responsible adults with actual paychecks.
At least, this is how it’s supposed to happen in an ideal economic world. Instead, we are waking up whenever we want and eating those leftovers in front of the computer. Or maybe we’re at work, since we’ve already finished our Christmas shopping online (much to the dismay of stores with quotas to reach), and can’t stomach the idea of long lines and pushy crowds. Black Friday originated as a day for businesses to bring their numbers out of the red (loss) and into the black ink (profit), but, oddly enough, has become known as Blitz Day or Buy Nothing Day—a day of almost pure window-shopping, as records show that only in volume of people are Black Fridays significant, not in actual money spent. Given the ever innovative internet, it’s now no surprise that certain companies—or more accurately, the human beings who work in their stores—grow nervous over a lack of attendance. More and more, because of higher bandwiths and quicker modems, people do stay in to shop, either experiencing Black Friday on the Web, or not at all.
The very fabric of consumerism is changing. People avoid lines and crowds, but don’t realize the risks they run, namely over-spending. Neither shopping with others (who perhaps help keep an eye on your wallet), nor the madness that keeps your eyes just on the windows compares with the comfortable space at home that allows for endless browsing and research, and also for conclusive purchasing. We’re often too lazy to run around town to several stores, especially when they might not carry every option for, let’s say, camcorders, but are more than happy to do the “legwork” on the Web. This is both good and bad—the internet affords a more solid base for consumers to compare prices, pluses and minuses, and other facets of a product, but the work of shopping may be somewhat less pleasurable.
My advice is this—shopping for friends and loved ones for the holidays is meant to be fun and tactile. We should not only buy them things, but be creative as well—whether that means composing a gift of many little, hand-picked things from independent and conglomerate stores, or actually knitting a scarf. The internet is indeed a great retail research tool, but perhaps we should begin to consider realities—the jobs lost to machines, lack of human interaction, over-spending, and the like. Use the Web wisely—yes, it’s great for picking the perfect gift, but it can be used strictly for research, or maybe for buying a book on how to do the knitting. Go out an enjoy your fellow human beings—if you need to take some headache medicine afterward, it’s okay! Touch them (within appropriate societal expectations)! Talk to them! The experience of working hard to find a pleasing, heart-felt gift is often so much better (at least, during the holiday season) than that of a mouse click. During a time when we see more and more automated ticketing systems for planes, trains, and movies and experience the “self check-out” aisle in the supermarket, it’s important to reconnect. We’re in more danger than we think of becoming alienated from each other—perhaps the holidays, cheesy as they can be, are the time to channel the warm fuzzies to counteract this effect.
Turkey and tofurky eaters of the world, take this Black Friday to find what you want on the Web, then get your butts out of your houses and touch things! Bring your whole family! I don’t care if you get on line at four a.m. outside of Walmart—at least you’re out there. At least your kids could be side by side with you, and you might have an intense conversation about how Mario is a better hero than Crash Bandicoot will ever be. They might just learn a little bit about consumerism.