I am not actually a huge fan of Buy Nothing Day. Like a lot of political initiatives these days, it is dependent on non-action rather than action, and it ultimately reifies the power of the market. That is, middle-class radicals make the same claims as middle-class conservatives: the market is the arbiter of truth, quality, ethics, democracy, etc etc etc. Whatever the market decides is correct. So on Buy Nothing Day, we are sending market signals to...whom? Well, to the market, one supposes. Bad market, stop marketing the marketplace!
But I do have to say that I prefer Buy Nothing Day to the new political "meme" (for lack of a better word, but it doesn't quite qualify as a political idea idea) I've seen cropping up this year and last—namely, one should not have a word of critique for Black Friday, doorbusters, long lines of shoppers, and the occasional worker trampling. Because you see, Black Friday shoppers are, or might be, poor, and the poor cannot afford quality merchandise other days of the year, and that further the poor are allowed to have quality things and to critique Black Friday is to be one of those nasty conservative sorts who want the poor to subsist solely on rice, beans, and pollution from the nearby coal mine until such time as Jesus comes to kill us all with His flaming sword.
Everyone deserves a My Little Pony.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The poor, entering the zoo enclosure to better be studied by social scientists.
This is not a Black Friday I am familiar with. When I was growing up—and if you want me to set the scene imagine plaster crumbling from the ceiling into the breakfast cereal while us kids ate it in our winter coats and with gloved hands because the heat wasn't on—Black Friday wasn't for "the poor." It was always the slightly richer relative, with money or even a van he could fill with goodies, and with the free time to get up early and go crazy with the shopping list. While always interested in a deal, me and mine were always more excited about deals that one could get on the waterfront in the days before containerization, the local flea market and the outlet store on the other side of the state line, and the discount on the stuff that everyone else already got two years ago. Be the last on your block to get an Atari 2600, and then settle in to watch some WHT because HBO is twice as much and the cable company was too afraid to bring precious copper wire down to the neighborhood anyway. Even in the days of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, the idea of joining the hordes to wrestle for a plastic doll just seemed odd. There was a little out of the way joint, and if you knew somebody and weren't picky—sure, a boy doll would be fine—maybe you could get one for the actual sticker price. And if not, so what? You'll live.
And all this is because the poor I knew, at least back then, had jobs that required hours on the day after Thanksgiving. The boats must still be unloaded, of course the Greek diners were open, and furnaces needed servicing. Nobody was getting up at 5am to do anything but go to work like any other day, and sometimes even at the mall. If you had an extra day off, the real early Christmas present was three more hours of sleep, followed by a turkey sandwich.
There was even, I daresay, a little bit of pride in being necessarily less materialistic than the selfish, spoiled "rich" brats with their long Christmas lists. A dozen years ago, when I got on LJ, I was appalled to see people presenting their "Christmas lists" in public blog posts. Mind you, these weren't lists of presents to buy, but ones they hoped to receive from parents and grandparents. People in their twenties and thirties were posting these! By way of contrast, I was well-adapted to saying "Nothing, I don't want anything for Christmas" by age ten or so. There was also pride in a certain canniness—don't get jerked around by commercials, by fake "sales" created by first increasing the price and then offering a discount, and plus everything was cheap shit that would break ten days later. And batteries were never included.
I'm still teased, thirty-five years later, for having wanted a particular pair of sneakers as a child.
Now some of my relatives and the relatives of my friends were dedicated bargain hunters, and may have even tried early sales once or twice. They were considered oddballs for doing so. But no, the frantic consumerism of the post-Thanksgiving sales period was considered one more folly that snoots, climbers, suckers, and la-de-dah types went for.
Of course, things change. Poverty is certainly more generalized these days than in the 1970s and 1980s, and the one-sided class war is more pronounced. Poverty porn is common, and critiques of the obvious "errors"—the purchased ten-dollar wine bottle, the smartphone that wasn't instantly sold off (to whom?), daring to have children without $100,000 in the bank somehow etc.—are inevitable and ruthless. And Black Friday really is qualitatively different now. It wasn't until the last decade, after years of beating the drums for it by the retailers, that the day actually really became the busiest shopping day of the year.
And of course, there are many more poverty experts out there. You know, people who ate a lot of lentils while in grad school, or who had a bad year or two after their folks split up and suddenly mommy was serving Kraft Dinner a little too often. And they all have Twitter, and Facebook, and blogs of their own. But safely ensconced in the middle class now, they have changed their tune from "Buy Nothing!" to "Shut Up And Let The Poors Shop!"
But all casual analysis is autobiography, and thus so is mine: I'm still not seeing huge lines of poor people lining up and freaking out for Black Friday. Not in my current social milieu, not among my family, not from watching TV with an eye toward catching class signifiers. I am wondering aloud right now if middle-class moralists aren't confusing "poor" and "black" once again—TV cameras love to zoom in on a black body misbehaving, after all, and so the assumption is that the unusual person who gets into a shoving match is somehow typical of the crowd...but not of his or her race! That would be (and is) racist. So it gets deflected onto class. The poors just have to get to the store early and flip out, you see. Related to this is the shocking claim that poor people may not realize that they can stay home and shop online. Poors are stupid too, you see, or don't have the Internet, despite years of lining up at 4am to buy PCs and smartphones...
What I am seeing during Black Friday are middle class people and the upper ranges of what's left of the working class being suckered as they often are by spectacle and phony promises of deals and sales and The Latest Thing. And then some other middle class people seeing a chance to provide a lecture to those who find such displays distasteful. If the middle class likes anything more than a discount on some fancy bullshit, it's the chance to moralize.
The poor I've known, and the poor I've been, have always been a little cleverer than that. So, Buy Nothing Day? Of course not—that's just as moralistic. There's no reason not to buy a cup of coffee (Yes yes, "Make your own at home!") or a sandwich (the most sexist of food items), or a tank of gas ("Get a Prius, Earth-killer!"), but there's also no reason to waste hours on a line to buy not-very-cheap "doorbusters." The poor aren't being suckers for the hype; the hype is that the poor are suckers.
So personally, I'd rather buy nothing.
But I do have to say that I prefer Buy Nothing Day to the new political "meme" (for lack of a better word, but it doesn't quite qualify as a political idea idea) I've seen cropping up this year and last—namely, one should not have a word of critique for Black Friday, doorbusters, long lines of shoppers, and the occasional worker trampling. Because you see, Black Friday shoppers are, or might be, poor, and the poor cannot afford quality merchandise other days of the year, and that further the poor are allowed to have quality things and to critique Black Friday is to be one of those nasty conservative sorts who want the poor to subsist solely on rice, beans, and pollution from the nearby coal mine until such time as Jesus comes to kill us all with His flaming sword.
Everyone deserves a My Little Pony.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The poor, entering the zoo enclosure to better be studied by social scientists.
This is not a Black Friday I am familiar with. When I was growing up—and if you want me to set the scene imagine plaster crumbling from the ceiling into the breakfast cereal while us kids ate it in our winter coats and with gloved hands because the heat wasn't on—Black Friday wasn't for "the poor." It was always the slightly richer relative, with money or even a van he could fill with goodies, and with the free time to get up early and go crazy with the shopping list. While always interested in a deal, me and mine were always more excited about deals that one could get on the waterfront in the days before containerization, the local flea market and the outlet store on the other side of the state line, and the discount on the stuff that everyone else already got two years ago. Be the last on your block to get an Atari 2600, and then settle in to watch some WHT because HBO is twice as much and the cable company was too afraid to bring precious copper wire down to the neighborhood anyway. Even in the days of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, the idea of joining the hordes to wrestle for a plastic doll just seemed odd. There was a little out of the way joint, and if you knew somebody and weren't picky—sure, a boy doll would be fine—maybe you could get one for the actual sticker price. And if not, so what? You'll live.
And all this is because the poor I knew, at least back then, had jobs that required hours on the day after Thanksgiving. The boats must still be unloaded, of course the Greek diners were open, and furnaces needed servicing. Nobody was getting up at 5am to do anything but go to work like any other day, and sometimes even at the mall. If you had an extra day off, the real early Christmas present was three more hours of sleep, followed by a turkey sandwich.
There was even, I daresay, a little bit of pride in being necessarily less materialistic than the selfish, spoiled "rich" brats with their long Christmas lists. A dozen years ago, when I got on LJ, I was appalled to see people presenting their "Christmas lists" in public blog posts. Mind you, these weren't lists of presents to buy, but ones they hoped to receive from parents and grandparents. People in their twenties and thirties were posting these! By way of contrast, I was well-adapted to saying "Nothing, I don't want anything for Christmas" by age ten or so. There was also pride in a certain canniness—don't get jerked around by commercials, by fake "sales" created by first increasing the price and then offering a discount, and plus everything was cheap shit that would break ten days later. And batteries were never included.
I'm still teased, thirty-five years later, for having wanted a particular pair of sneakers as a child.
Now some of my relatives and the relatives of my friends were dedicated bargain hunters, and may have even tried early sales once or twice. They were considered oddballs for doing so. But no, the frantic consumerism of the post-Thanksgiving sales period was considered one more folly that snoots, climbers, suckers, and la-de-dah types went for.
Of course, things change. Poverty is certainly more generalized these days than in the 1970s and 1980s, and the one-sided class war is more pronounced. Poverty porn is common, and critiques of the obvious "errors"—the purchased ten-dollar wine bottle, the smartphone that wasn't instantly sold off (to whom?), daring to have children without $100,000 in the bank somehow etc.—are inevitable and ruthless. And Black Friday really is qualitatively different now. It wasn't until the last decade, after years of beating the drums for it by the retailers, that the day actually really became the busiest shopping day of the year.
And of course, there are many more poverty experts out there. You know, people who ate a lot of lentils while in grad school, or who had a bad year or two after their folks split up and suddenly mommy was serving Kraft Dinner a little too often. And they all have Twitter, and Facebook, and blogs of their own. But safely ensconced in the middle class now, they have changed their tune from "Buy Nothing!" to "Shut Up And Let The Poors Shop!"
But all casual analysis is autobiography, and thus so is mine: I'm still not seeing huge lines of poor people lining up and freaking out for Black Friday. Not in my current social milieu, not among my family, not from watching TV with an eye toward catching class signifiers. I am wondering aloud right now if middle-class moralists aren't confusing "poor" and "black" once again—TV cameras love to zoom in on a black body misbehaving, after all, and so the assumption is that the unusual person who gets into a shoving match is somehow typical of the crowd...but not of his or her race! That would be (and is) racist. So it gets deflected onto class. The poors just have to get to the store early and flip out, you see. Related to this is the shocking claim that poor people may not realize that they can stay home and shop online. Poors are stupid too, you see, or don't have the Internet, despite years of lining up at 4am to buy PCs and smartphones...
What I am seeing during Black Friday are middle class people and the upper ranges of what's left of the working class being suckered as they often are by spectacle and phony promises of deals and sales and The Latest Thing. And then some other middle class people seeing a chance to provide a lecture to those who find such displays distasteful. If the middle class likes anything more than a discount on some fancy bullshit, it's the chance to moralize.
The poor I've known, and the poor I've been, have always been a little cleverer than that. So, Buy Nothing Day? Of course not—that's just as moralistic. There's no reason not to buy a cup of coffee (Yes yes, "Make your own at home!") or a sandwich (the most sexist of food items), or a tank of gas ("Get a Prius, Earth-killer!"), but there's also no reason to waste hours on a line to buy not-very-cheap "doorbusters." The poor aren't being suckers for the hype; the hype is that the poor are suckers.
So personally, I'd rather buy nothing.