Holiday shopping is no time for common sense
By Craig Carter
Sunday, December 2, 2007 6:52 AM PST
As I waded through the reams of sale ads that were included in our Thanksgiving Day paper, I couldn’t help but feel horribly manipulated.
There’s something just plain wrong about corporate retail getting people to jump through idiotic hoops just to get a supposed bargain. Especially when you consider the price of the gasoline that was used to ferry these led-by-the-nose consumers from one grand sale to the next, and the amount of stress and aggravation involved. It leaves you to wonder just how much of a bargain was actually attained.
However, my biggest beef is with the early bird advertising that takes place every year on the day after Thanksgiving Day. You gotta get to the store by 6 a.m. to get a great price on a DVD player and/or the latest must-have electronic gadget. No, you gotta go out at 5 a.m. to get a great deal on women’s underpants and power tools (hardly interchangeable, but equally entertaining to the male mind). No, you gotta go out at 4 a.m. to catch the buy of a lifetime on a television set or an MP3 player. No, you gotta go out at 3 a.m. to get a phenomenal buy on chocolate-covered cherries and Christmas-themed Pez Dispensers. No, you gotta go out at 2 a.m. to get half price on a set of cookware and Christmas decorations.
No, you gotta go out at 1 a.m. to join the throngs of folks that are willing to kill each other to be the first to the big buys inside. I cannot help but wonder if these folks realize how manipulated they really are. Apparently not, because every year it’s the same old thing. The retailers offer”special” things to the first few (in comparison to their day’s customer count), and people flock to their store in droves. I have this ugly feeling that if one of the big box retailers were to offer after Thanksgiving bargains only to the people who showed up at their door at 5 a.m. wearing nothing but a cow pie helmet, people would be more than willing to risk frostbite or death, waiting naked in line in the cold with cow dung on their heads.
I don’t know. Perhaps I have my teeth firmly sunk into the hand that feeds my wife, our cats and me but where does it end? And more importantly, why are people so willing to put themselves through this torture?
Especially when you consider the supposed reason for it all.
Yes sir, some two millennia ago a child was born in a manger in Bethlehem (Israel, not Pennsylvania), who would later sacrifice his life so that all our sins would be forgiven.
And through the ensuing 2007 years, the followers of this child got the goofy idea that the best way to commemorate the whole wonderful idea that their God loved them so much he was willing to give his only begotten son to forgive our sins was to see how many people they could fit into a shopping mall the morning after a gluttonous feast.
Or maybe to put it better, some 2007 years later, people are more than willing to fall hook, line and sinker for a cash cow boondoggle that would make PT Barnum envious to the bone.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t give each other presents to commemorate the birth of the savior.
I just cannot help but think there are better ways to get those presents than to fall for some pretty cynical advertising stunts.
Do you know what would happen if no one showed up at the stores at 5 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving?
The retailers would probably react by giving us bargains at a more reasonable hour, and maybe we’d remember the reason we’re buying all this stuff in the first place.
Naw, that might entail sense, and we certainly can’t have any of that.
