Saturday, November 26, 2011
So, Black Friday has come and gone and at least no one got killed this year. There were fights, pepper spray incidents, robberies, and disgruntled employees, but unlike 2008 everyone seems to have survived.
I have not seen the sales figures, but perhaps this game of chicken where retailers, primarily the Wal-Marts and Best Buys of the country, race to open earlier and earlier was a smashing success. I guess thousands of people left their Thanksgiving meals and families to race through the dark to the overcrowded parking lot of their local (or perhaps distant) shopping mall to secure their $200 HD tvs and $14.88 waffle irons.
For the life of me I can’t imagine waking up early or staying up late and fighting those masses to save a few hundred bucks. Even a few thousand. Now admittedly I am not the matriarch of a family of dozens of relatives for each of whom I need a unique present while shopping on a budget because the local factory cut me down to 20 hours a week two years ago, leaving me neither eligible for unemployment nor able to pay all my bills. I am sure for many, many people the savings which occur on Black Friday (or I guess the ever-darkening hours of Thursday) can make the difference between a satisfactory holiday or one with presents so meager they only offer reminders of how bleak the financial situation really is. Still, I cannot understand why those same bargains offered during normal business hours couldn’t provide the same satisfaction.
But I doubt most Black Friday shoppers are those for whom the difference between $14.88 and regular price on a waffle iron.(about $35) makes or breaks their finances. I bet for most shoppers this becomes more sport than saving. They want to stroll into work on Monday and proclaim themselves winners of Black Friday because they bought a $200 Ann Taylor dress for $120. Best Buy’s commercial where the woman shows her list to an employee seemingly asking for help, but only to show him that she got everything—“Bam” she exclaims like a football player celebrating a first down (and don’t get me started on that)—reflects the sporting atmosphere of this entire process. I doubt most people buying the $200 televisions have no television now. They probably bought a $500 tv last year and felt great when it was marked down from $2000.
Meanwhile, an employee of Target in Omaha has become somewhat of a folk hero for refusing to work on Thanksgiving night. His willingness to risk termination for standing up against what has been portrayed as a Scooge-like big company had him turn to change.org, the website which hosts all kinds of online petitions whining about bank fees or innocent prisoners or bull-burning in Spain. Of course, these are the same kind of complaints the Occupy Wall Street protestors have. See something you don’t like, blame a big corporation and throw a temper tantrum which is little more than a more sophisticated version of a two-year-old stomping his feet and pounding his fists.
I suggest that, while I sympathize with his message that there is no earthly reason Target needs to be open at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, his complaint should not rest with the company actually which provides him a living, but with those who reward the stores for this behavior. (I should point out this guy was not being torn away from his children, he just wanted to sleep. He is married but childless. Maybe I should also point out that despite his degree from Park University in Missouri ((??)) he earns his living working as a shopping cart attendant at Target and a printing supervisor at OfficeMax. I doubt he would be very difficult to replace with another graduate of an esteemed institution or perhaps a high school dropout.)
A truism of capitalism is that businesses will take actions (by and large) which make them the most money. Target opened at 10 p.m. because they believed customers would arrive at 10 to start their overindulgent shopping shortly after their overindulgent eating (which might actually work off a few calories). Had they opened the doors to find the parking lot empty and their employees with nothing to do, our Target hero would have no need to file a petition asking to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Only because thousands of people are willing, even demanding, to shop at what for the rest of the year would be seen as ungodly hours, do the stores pander to this ridiculousness.
This is just another example of people blaming businesses for trying to maximize profits by giving people what they want, when the problem lies with the customers themselves. If you want Target to open at 8 a.m. convince people not to shop until then. (If you want to stop paying $6.50 for a hot dog at the ballgame, convince people to stop buying them for that price.) But no one wants to criticize the consumer. After all that is us. And in America we never blame ourselves for anything. We rarely even engage in critical self-analysis. (Except for some of us who seemingly do nothing else.) Black Friday has become the spectacle it has because American shoppers made it that way.
To paraphrase Cassius:
“The fault lies not in our stores, but in ourselves.”
I have not seen the sales figures, but perhaps this game of chicken where retailers, primarily the Wal-Marts and Best Buys of the country, race to open earlier and earlier was a smashing success. I guess thousands of people left their Thanksgiving meals and families to race through the dark to the overcrowded parking lot of their local (or perhaps distant) shopping mall to secure their $200 HD tvs and $14.88 waffle irons.
For the life of me I can’t imagine waking up early or staying up late and fighting those masses to save a few hundred bucks. Even a few thousand. Now admittedly I am not the matriarch of a family of dozens of relatives for each of whom I need a unique present while shopping on a budget because the local factory cut me down to 20 hours a week two years ago, leaving me neither eligible for unemployment nor able to pay all my bills. I am sure for many, many people the savings which occur on Black Friday (or I guess the ever-darkening hours of Thursday) can make the difference between a satisfactory holiday or one with presents so meager they only offer reminders of how bleak the financial situation really is. Still, I cannot understand why those same bargains offered during normal business hours couldn’t provide the same satisfaction.
But I doubt most Black Friday shoppers are those for whom the difference between $14.88 and regular price on a waffle iron.(about $35) makes or breaks their finances. I bet for most shoppers this becomes more sport than saving. They want to stroll into work on Monday and proclaim themselves winners of Black Friday because they bought a $200 Ann Taylor dress for $120. Best Buy’s commercial where the woman shows her list to an employee seemingly asking for help, but only to show him that she got everything—“Bam” she exclaims like a football player celebrating a first down (and don’t get me started on that)—reflects the sporting atmosphere of this entire process. I doubt most people buying the $200 televisions have no television now. They probably bought a $500 tv last year and felt great when it was marked down from $2000.
Meanwhile, an employee of Target in Omaha has become somewhat of a folk hero for refusing to work on Thanksgiving night. His willingness to risk termination for standing up against what has been portrayed as a Scooge-like big company had him turn to change.org, the website which hosts all kinds of online petitions whining about bank fees or innocent prisoners or bull-burning in Spain. Of course, these are the same kind of complaints the Occupy Wall Street protestors have. See something you don’t like, blame a big corporation and throw a temper tantrum which is little more than a more sophisticated version of a two-year-old stomping his feet and pounding his fists.
I suggest that, while I sympathize with his message that there is no earthly reason Target needs to be open at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, his complaint should not rest with the company actually which provides him a living, but with those who reward the stores for this behavior. (I should point out this guy was not being torn away from his children, he just wanted to sleep. He is married but childless. Maybe I should also point out that despite his degree from Park University in Missouri ((??)) he earns his living working as a shopping cart attendant at Target and a printing supervisor at OfficeMax. I doubt he would be very difficult to replace with another graduate of an esteemed institution or perhaps a high school dropout.)
A truism of capitalism is that businesses will take actions (by and large) which make them the most money. Target opened at 10 p.m. because they believed customers would arrive at 10 to start their overindulgent shopping shortly after their overindulgent eating (which might actually work off a few calories). Had they opened the doors to find the parking lot empty and their employees with nothing to do, our Target hero would have no need to file a petition asking to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Only because thousands of people are willing, even demanding, to shop at what for the rest of the year would be seen as ungodly hours, do the stores pander to this ridiculousness.
This is just another example of people blaming businesses for trying to maximize profits by giving people what they want, when the problem lies with the customers themselves. If you want Target to open at 8 a.m. convince people not to shop until then. (If you want to stop paying $6.50 for a hot dog at the ballgame, convince people to stop buying them for that price.) But no one wants to criticize the consumer. After all that is us. And in America we never blame ourselves for anything. We rarely even engage in critical self-analysis. (Except for some of us who seemingly do nothing else.) Black Friday has become the spectacle it has because American shoppers made it that way.
To paraphrase Cassius:
“The fault lies not in our stores, but in ourselves.”
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