For many people, DBA Day is a show of resistance and an attempt to get people to notice that we’ve become so consumerist in our society that we are losing hold of the better aspects of ourselves while we spend ourselves into economic slavery via our credit cards. The news had the report this Black Friday of the woman who maced 20 customers at a store in her pursuit of an Xbox.
The YouTube had a video of Walmart customers rioting over $2 waffle irons. One particularly memorable image—memorable like frame 313 of the Zapruder film—is of a woman, massive gut protruding from under her shirt and rolling over her pants, carrying off four or five of the waffle irons. If this had been an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the screen would have had giant flashing letters spelling our “GLUTTONY.”
On DBA Day, I went to the local Target. Target, Walmart, BestBuy, they’re all the same. I bought two gift cards for an online game that I like to play. I also picked up some Aleve (a pain in my side that will not go away, what I wouldn’t give for health insurance), a Coca-Cola (to wash down the Aleve), and a roll of Scotch tape (to tape some things). I also took a walk around the store. I came away with some conclusions.
The Black Friday shoppers are replacing/augmenting church. I don’t mean they derive a religious experience by picking up cheap plastic crap made in China by slave labor. I mean that going to Target and demonstrating that they have money to spend (or credit cards that haven’t been shut off) is the equivalent of going to church as a social behavior. They do it because, well, they’ve always done it, a form of auto-hypnosis that allows a chunk of the day to not be spent thinking to one’s self about why one’s life is going down the crapper.
Those Black Friday shoppers are not going to stop shopping because someone on the Internet told them to. You might as well try to reason with someone who believes in an End Times religion. They don’t care about analyzing or debating. Take a look at the faces of the people pushing their carts. It’s like the looks people have on their faces when they’re in line to use a bathroom. Weary resignation. Somewhere in the back of their minds is a voice screaming, “Your goal is to get a $39 set of cookware? Do you really think, at any level, it’s going to be any good? But it’s still the high point of the day, isn’t it? How do you not go home and blow your brains out? They sell guns in the sporting goods section, you know.”
Most shoppers, most of the time, aren’t thinking about Marxist concepts or the latest issue of Adbusters. Next time you’re at the supermarket, look in the other carts. Three-liter soda bottles. Jumbo bags of chips. Family-size microwave dinners for those who couldn’t stop themselves from breeding and really don’t care what their obligate burdens (aka families) shovel into their pie holes at the feeding trough. If supermarkets stocked IV bags of high-fructose corn syrup, these modern Sisyphuses would pile it hip-deep into the cart if the boys in marketing could put the right packaging around it.
But, let’s assume you pulled off a Thanksgiving Day miracle and got these people to buy nothing on DBA Day. So what? Do you think, for even a single second, that Target, Walmart or the rest of the box stores give a damn about one day’s numbers? Like a casino, the cash flow evens out over time. If the trend continued for enough years, the stores will simply use staying closed as a marketing ploy to show how much they “care.™”
DBA Day is never going to make a dent. Why? Because—and here (as opposed to all the rest of the piece) I sound elitist—most of these people are too far gone. It’s too late. The egg’s already been laid in them, and the parasite has invaded. Their lives are such hellstorms that there’s nothing that your little pep talk about thrift and self-determination can offer that will activate their pleasure centers as handily as an automatic ice crusher or a one-touch foot-massage bath for $19.99 (ask about our store credit card at the checkout).
So instead of a futile piece of agitprop, the next time someone urges you to participate in DBA Day, fine, Don’t Buy Anything. But go into a Walmart or a Target, bring a friend, and just wander the aisles, not Buying Anything, while you talk to each other. “Gee, can you believe people are falling for it again? Don’t they realize the prices will be lower in two weeks? That today’s called ‘Black Friday’ because it’s all about the store making enough money to get in the black?”
“And you’d think they’d realize that putting a $500 TV on a credit card means they’ll almost certainly be paying $600 for it by the time they make all the payments? And that’s assuming they don’t miss a single payment and get a late fee and an APR hike.”
You probably won’t make a difference then, either. But there’s a tiny chance that you’ll catch one person overhearing you who’ll have that moment of horrific clarity that is so often necessary for an addict to finally put down the booze, the needle, the knife and fork, or the little rectangle of plastic.
