Dec 07 2008
Consumerism Isn’t the Real Problem
If you’ve been paying attention, everyone is writing about how that one Wal-Mart employee getting trampled means the Holidays are too consumerist and OH GOD WE’VE LOST OUR WAY IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESESESESESES!
Here was my first thought: gee, maybe now Wal-Mart and everyone else will stop with the early morning crap on black Friday. Here’s what needs to happen:
- People need to register for specific items at a specific store in advance online. They will get a number based on when they register. Or you can randomly draw people from a group to win an item at a selected price. People will only be able to select one special offer/item to purchase.
- Stores will know in advance how many of each special offer they have and will stop assigning numbers after that point.
- People will need to print out a page showing their number and some sort of special system barcode or something.
- Those people who get a confirmation page and number, will go to the store at their convenience on Black Friday to pick up the product.
- None of this should be hard for a store that already has order online, pickup in store in place.
- No crowds, no stampedes, no early morning bullshit for employees or consumers.
Here’s what I think: I think businesses are greedy bitches with no concern for consumers or their employees. They don’t give a fuck about stampedes in their stores, about employees or consumers getting injured in the wake of the consumerism that makes them rich. The danger of consumerism isn’t in consumers becoming consumed (I’m pretty sure Shakespeare has a few lines that say that much better than I do – something about fires and flames and oxygen). The danger in consumerism is we become slaves to the businesses who produce the crap we consume. It’s in us not demanding better treatment from those businesses – on behalf of ourselves and the employees.
Change starts with us. I spent my day after Thanksgiving drinking milky tea and eating sticky toffee pudding in an English tearoom, looking through some locally-owned shops and browsing etsy.com. You can rock that scene, too, there’s no danger of anyone stampeding into you except for a cat slipping on hard-wood floors.
PS. If you don’t stop after shopping like crazy on Black Friday and drop some change into the Salvation Army bell-ringer’s tin or buy a toy for Toys For Tots or some canned goods for the local food-bank or whatever other small token a respected and well-known charity is asking from you, you really are an asshole. I totally laid a buck on the bell-ringer who serenaded me with Feliz Navidad.
Best Buy, much as it pains me to defend them, have dealt with the Black Friday crowds pretty well the past few years. They have little cards printed up for each of the big sale items — the $399 laptop, the $699 HDTV, whatever — in exactly the same number as there are units in stock for each. Then they go through the line at the door about an hour before the store opens and ask each person what they’re in line to buy, starting at the front of the line. The cards for each item run out whenever they run out, and nobody stampedes in the door because it’s already been determined who’s going to get the good stuff and there are usually plenty of the other items for the people who’ve lined up that early.
I believe the store I worked at may also have printed some sequentially numbered “standby” cards, to deal with things like credit cards being declined or a customer changing his mind.
As far as I know, Black Friday at Best Buy is usually pretty orderly.
Also, the problem with the solution you propose is that it will not result in hundreds of people crowding the entrances in the morning and making impulse purchases when they miss out on the item they wanted. Business, as you say, are greedy bitches.
It’s not true that people won’t crowd into stores still on Black Friday – most people have the day off, and businesses can still have plenty of sales, the solution is only for the big-ticket items that cause stampedes. Sort of similar to Best Buy’s solution.
I guess what I’m saying is, I think a large portion of the people who go to Wal-Mart at all on Black Friday do so specifically in hope of getting one of the big-ticket items. It’s not like it’s a pleasant day to shop. If the line’s already long when they get there, they stick around and impulse buy instead of bailing out.
We didn’t want any of the big-ticket items this year. We looked through the sales flyers and saw a couple of things that we would’ve bought, but none were good enough deals to justify leaving the house and entering the shopping fray. If we really wanted a big-ass TV and had the opportunity to save $500 on said item, and we decided it was worth going to the store on Black Friday, and they were out of TVs when we got there, we probably would still have bought those other small items. And maybe a couple of other things impulsively. On the other hand, if we knew in advance that there were no TVs, we’d have stayed home.
Your solution is optimal for the consumer, but stampedes are good for business.
Which is why I think consumers, instead of blaming consumerism, need to change the way businesses do business.
Come to ireland, here we don’t have a black friday or the silly online version of it. Nobody gets trampled. and on ‘boxing day’ everyone stays at home and eats a rather disgusting version of cottage pie but made with leftover scraps of turkey.