BLACK FRIDAY 2006

(sick, sick, sick)

New York, November 26 – On Friday night, I went out to dinner with friends at a Korean restaurant on West 32^nd Street off Sixth Avenue. The restaurant was a couple of blocks from Herald Square and Macy*s. It was NOT pretty.

Hordes of people, obviously whipped up into consumerist frenzy, were everywhere.

It was like New Year’s Eve at Times Square, without the fun. It was like free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park’s The Seagull with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, minus the spectacle. It was the Champs Elysées, sans the glamour.

It was Black Friday 2006.

For those of you who don’t know what Black Friday is, well -- for decades now, the Friday after Thanksgiving Day has been called Black Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season, the day when retailers hope to move into the ‘black.’ In a perversion of monumental proportions, Americans have been brain-washed into believing that going out and spending big is the patriotic thing to do.

Brain-washing is the only possible explanation for people camping out overnight to be the first ones at opening time. Shortly after midnight Thursday, an estimated 15,000 shoppers pushed and shoved their way into the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah. Police soon joined them, responding to reports of nine skirmishes.

It was the earliest Black Friday on record. Trying to one-up its rivals, CompUSA started its annual Black Friday sales at 9 pm on Thursday, just as many Americans sat down for Thanksgiving dessert. While most malls, from Utah to Maine, opened at midnight, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and J. C. Penney began ringing up sales at 5 a.m. Friday (a 6 a.m. opening at Target seemed so 2005).

To lure customers, merchants dangled all sorts of discounts. Macy’s, Sears, J. C. Penney and Kohl’s all placed the same bet: that a $10 coupon on the front of their circulars would draw crowds. Gap offered 30 percent off everything if customers spent more than $50, and Kmart reduced the price of some apparel by 50 percent.

But once they were in the store, many customers heard a deflating message. “Sold out, sold out, sold out,” announced the manager at a Staples on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday at 7 a.m. “When?” asked the incredulous customer. “An hour ago,” replied the manager — in other words, the minute the store opened.

At 6 a.m. Friday morning in Times Square, a line of shoppers several hundred deep burst through the doors of Toys “R” Us and promptly formed a second, equally long line to buy the $40 T.M.X. Elmo (Tickle Me Elmo Version No. 10).

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For many of us, the day after Thanksgiving (and November 25 outside of North America) is BUY NOTHING DAY.

On that same day described above, thousands of activists and concerned citizens in 65 countries took a 24-hour consumer detox as part of the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day, a global phenomenon that originated in Vancouver, Canada.

From joining zombie marches through malls to organising credit card cut-ups and shopoholic clinics, Buy Nothing Day activists aim to challenge themselves, their families and their friends to switch off from shopping and tune back into life for one day. Featured in recent years by CNN, Wired, the BBC, and the CBC, the global event is celebrated as a relaxed family holiday, as a non-commercial street party, or even as a politically charged public protest. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending.

Reasons for participating in Buy Nothing Day are as varied as the people who choose to participate. Some see it as an escape from the marketing mind games and frantic consumer binge that has come to characterise the holiday season, and our culture in general. Others use it to expose the environmental and ethical consequences of over- consumption.

Two recent, high-profile disaster warnings outline the sudden urgency of our dilemma. First, in October, a global warming report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern predicted that climate change will lead to the most massive and widest-ranging market failure the world has ever seen. Soon after, a major study published in the journal Science forecast the near-total collapse of global fisheries within 40 years.

Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which was responsible for turning Buy Nothing Day into an international annual event, said, “Our headlong plunge into ecological collapse requires a profound shift in the way we see things. Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are band-aid solutions if we don’t address the core problem: we have to consume less. This is the message of Buy Nothing Day.”

As Lasn suggests, Buy Nothing Day isn't just about changing your habits for one day. It’s about starting a lasting lifestyle commitment to consuming less and producing less waste. With six billion people on the planet, the onus if on the most affluent – the upper 20% that consume 80% of the world’s resources – to begin setting the example.

Hoping to spend only dinner fare on Buy Nothing Day (BND), I walked to the restaurant from my apartment, a good 40-minute walk. It turned out I was treated to dinner that night (thank you Norah!). I walked back after dinner, mindful that this was the very first BND when I had not spent one penny all day Black Friday.

And, best of all, I am convinced this was the patriotic thing to do.

HOT OFF THE PRESS:

ShopperTrak RCT, which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based stores, found that sales for the day after Thanksgiving rose 6 percent from last year, to $9 billion. On the comparable day last year, sales at stores monitored by ShopperTrak dropped 0.9 percent.

An experiment with 12 a.m. openings bolstered mall traffic across the country. The crowds swelled to 15,000 at the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah, 20,000 at the Christiana Mall in Newark, Del. and 50,000 at the Main Mall in Portland, Me.

Wally Brewster, the head of marketing at General Growth Properties, which owns the three malls, said stores that opened at midnight reported “significantly higher sales” than those that waited until 6 a.m.

Sixty percent of the stores at malls like Fashion Place opened at midnight but, because of the turnout, stores that sat it out were already planning to participate next year, Mr. Brewster said.

Emily Spendlove, 35, drove 45 minutes to wait in line outside the Fashion Place Mall Thursday night, skipping sleep “to be part of the excitement.” Once inside, she spent $120 at an athletic clothing store called Fanzz, buying four Chicago Bears football products — two helmets, a beach towel and a photo montage.

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Congratulations Emily! Keep that beach towel all ready for next summer!

You are a patriot and a scholar!