Like A Dog On A Leash
Speak Anthony!
Anthony, roll over… roll over!
Sit! Stay!…
Good boy.
Now, wait in this line for two hours.
It’s Black Friday and I’m feeling like a dog on a corporate leash. Keep in mind, I am here blogging and sipping on coffee, and watching HGTV, but I feel the call of the pied piper playing his tune of limited-time-only uberdeals, and it makes me feel manipulated, and a little mad. I’m mad at the dominating system of consumerism that attenuates our humanity and overwhelms the holiday season, and perhaps attenuates our humanity by overwhelming the holiday season. I’m also mad that I am so vulnerable to such obvious appeals and manipulations.
So, will I go out and buy?… Maybe. But, if I do, I’m going to pull back on the leash a little by going on my time.
Wrote the following comment on November 25th, 2011 at 3:39 pm #
And yes, I realize that watching HGTV doesn’t help matters much, as I am quite sure that in some measure it contributes to discontent. On the other hand, it does inspire some good ideas for home decorating, and sometimes with a limited budget in mind. But still, there’s that whole discontent thing. Of course, the root of the matter is in my heart, and yet media systems certainly exacerbate such root matters. Perhaps I should do a HGTV detox by going to rundown neighborhoods, and then by comparison realize the abundance I have, rather than always looking at those who have more via HGTV transformation. I guess to some degree this is a matter of perspective. Whatever the case may be, material abundance: good, consumerism: bad.
Wrote the following comment on November 25th, 2011 at 6:45 pm #
please leave the pepper spray home.
interesting that I have SUCH BF antipathy, having been brought to a couple sales, that I’m not intrigued at all by it. I’ll get what I get when I get them. If they’re gone, so be it.
Wrote the following comment on November 25th, 2011 at 7:35 pm #
Roger – Actually, I generally don’t care about Black Friday as well, and as it turned out, I didn’t do any shopping till after lunch. The thing that kind of got me this year was a free Kodak digital camera (limited supply) to customers who spent over $40.00. They were long gone, as I expected, by the time I got to the store. But nonetheless my kids need clothes, and we shopped just the same. Still, the BF hype just bugs me, as the whole affair encourages false consciousness, and is a bit undignified and ungracious.
Wrote the following comment on November 30th, 2011 at 12:19 am #
Roger stole my pepper spray line.
And I am in complete, and wholehearted sympathy with your remarks – which, it seems, is increasingly shared by others… at least as I have read online, and heard via NPR. I don’t watch much teevee, and in fact, have probably viewed about 15 minutes in the last 30 days – with a recent exception when I viewed the two episodes of Ivan the Terrible, and a Greta Garbo film on Turner Classic Movies. (ITT, Part I 1944 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037824/ & ITT, Part II 1958 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051790/ & Love (adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), 1927 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018107/)
I thought myself fortunate in this regard, that one such commentator opined about the same concept as I had earlier expressed. And what might that be? The excessive devotion by, and reliance upon ONE DAY/365 upon which retailers rely to make up for losses thereto.
It seems to me – again, which sentiment was expressed on air by another – that such over reliance upon one day bespeaks poorly of an operational model, particularly the mark-up/profit margin.
Case in point: I had read remarks of a shopper who was waiting with bated breath for a $199 sale for a 46-inch flat-screen, LED teevee which regularly sold for $500+. There was, as you might imagine, a limited supply. However, if the retailer would regularly mark their merchandise down in price (discount), and rely upon volume to make whatever total profits they needed – essentially, a (former?) part of the Wal-Mart model – they could rethink the whole “Black Friday” thing, their customer base would be expanded, and they could enjoy more business-oriented benefits.