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The Buck Stops Here
Every year, in stores all over America, the moment the Halloween leftovers are relegated to the sale bin, the Christmas decorations start going up. This signals the beginning of retailers’ busiest season of the year, and the start of two full months of aggressive marketing across the media spectrum in order to get U.S. consumers to spend, spend spend.
At the newspaper where I work, I started designing my first shopping guide of the season during the first week of November. The paper plans on doing a series of six guides, one of which is devoted to gifts for pets. The editor wants to call it “Creature Comforts.” I suggested the title “Why Al Quaeda Wants to Kill Us.” I’ve long believed that living in a country that has supermarkets for dogs and cats, when much of the rest of the world has no food or potable water, might be raising a tad more ire than that alleged hatred of freedom the President is so fond of evoking. But, I digress.
Retailers need us to start pulling out the plastic to buy more stuff than we can cram into our mini-mansions, because most of them don’t even go into the black, profit-wise, until the weekend after Thanksgiving. It’s a strange business model. Imagine asking a bank to loan you money to open a business that you expected would only make money for two months out of the year. On the other hand, financiers once happily lent money to people who started online businesses that didn’t sell anything, ever.
Even for those who think it is their civic or God-given duty to buy hundreds of dollars worth of items during the Christmas season, it just might not be possible for very much longer because Americans are just, plain, running out of money to buy shit they don’t need.
Politicians and economists on both sides of the debate about American prosperity cite varying statistics about income and spending. Those on the right make it seem as if the strong GDP and an SUV in every garage are symbolic of rising affluence. More left-leaning arguments cite the lack of wage growth relative to inflation, the death of pensions, the death of affordable health care and education, and the enormous amount of personal debt most Americans now carry, as a sign that things are not so good once you look beyond the shiny packaging.
But, as my boss likes to say, “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” Statistics can be interpreted in almost any fashion to advance an argument. The real proof of whether or not America’s shop-‘til-you-drop model is sustainable lies somewhere in the piles of bills sitting on kitchen tables across the country, and the fear in all our hearts that the next corporate lay-off might include us. Let the pundits say what they will, but for many of us, the future doesn’t look quite so bright.
So, what can one do when debts have us down and Santa’s knocking at the door for a handout? We can just stop buying things we don’t need. Adbusters.org, an anti-consumer group, based in Canada, sponsors an annual Buy Nothing Day. It takes place on November 25, during what is known as the biggest shopping weekend of the year. The organizers of this new-fangled holiday ask that we all use this one day to refrain from feeding our addiction to consuming for 24 hours, and furthermore, to take a look at the true, emotional implications of the holiday season. Here’s what they say about Buy Nothing Day and its sibling, Buy Nothing Christmas:
“This year, why not gather together your loved ones and decide to do things differently? With the simplest of plans you can create a new rhythm, purpose and meaning for the holidays. Why not try a Buy Nothing Christmas?
If that's too extreme for grandma and the kids, maybe try a Buy Less Christmas. Or a Buy Fairer Christmas. Or a Slow-Down Christmas. Whatever you decide, 'tis the season to reclaim our celebration from the grip of commercial forces.”
Remember, it’s not up to you to single-handedly save Wal-Mart or Federated Stores from lower-than projected holiday earnings — even if your 401k is larded with their stocks. It’s up to you to do something that makes financial and, dare I say it, spiritual sense during these last two months of the year. If your kids are going to throw an ADD-inspired fit when they don’t get that new Elmo doll or iPod, then maybe what’s wrong is not how much you earn, but the demands you allow your children to make on your wallet. If things get really crazy, you can always gather the family around the communal TV and show some documentaries about the living conditions in Darfur to give everyone something to cry about.
I’ve got nothing against honest retailers making money on the goods they sell. I’ve got nothing against buying presents for loved-ones. But what Buy Nothing Day allows us to do, is to disengage from a culture that tells us we must, not only buy things at certain times of year to prove our worth, or show our love, but that we must do it at risk to our own financial viability and sanity. Come on; prove you’re not an addict. Skip just one day.
NOVEMBER 12 , 2006 ©Suzanne Rush 2006
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Challenging Ti[RED] Ideas
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is calling for seemingly-humorless, U2 singer, Bono, to drop his Red shopping campaign to raise money to fight AIDS in Africa, and to get Americans to give directly to these impoverished people. As the New York-based anti-consumer activist and church leader, Bill Talen, puts it in a letter to Bono on his website:
"You are right that the paradox of American giving needs to be solved. This Christian nation doesn’t give. We have tended recently to bomb people in need, rather than help them. But shopping to give is like bombing to save. You got it backwards, Mr. Bono. Don’t glamorize shopping."
Since 1997, the Church of Stop Shopping, which celebrates Buy Nothing Day on November 24, has staged actions in major retail outlets across the country, including the Disney Story, The Gap and various Starbucks outlets — which were targeted for, among other abuses, their role in creating what Reverend Billy calls “fake bohemia.” His actions are designed to inform consumers about the shoddy labor practices of America’s most beloved retailers, as well as to illuminate the spiritual vacuity inherent in choosing endless shopping as a lifestyle.
In his letter to Bono he points out that by encouraging Americans to buy into the ti[RED] concept of purchasing more stuff as a means to give a little back, Bono is missing the point that the addiction to shopping in the first world plays a significant part in why third-world countries are destitute to begin with.
The Church of Stop Shopping website provides a number of links to organizations to whom converts can donate directly. Just follow the Donate Without Celebrities link from their DearBono.org site for suggestions. And remember, 14 months after hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast region, only 22 families in New Orleans have received the federal grants promised by the President to rebuild their homes. Africa needs our help, but so do our countrymen. If Target can put Christ back into the holidays, so can we.
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