Jacie Williams is a junior majoring in communication. She can be contacted at [email protected].What better time to celebrate our consumer-driven lives than during the holidays? We have the Macy’s Day Parade just around the corner, and everyone knows what that means!
Black Friday has rolled around again. This means sales, sales, sales for all you seasoned shoppers out there.
Even the name of the parade is about a store. There is an entire parade for the opening of sales season. What joy shopping brings to our country.
Consumerism drives America. It is not a critique, just a fact. I happen to enjoy having all this nice stuff cluttering my apartment.
Imagine this: the night before you gorged yourself on not just seconds but even thirds of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry jellies, pies and all the other Thanksgiving Day foods. You ate so much that it put you straight into a turkey-coma and you have been asleep ever since you left the table.
But the alarm is going off. You look at the clock and realize you have already slept in. It is 4:30 in the morning! If you do not get a move on now, you might miss all the shop openings, and everyone knows that it is the best time to shop.
When you get home later in the evening with a maxed-out credit card, you can always just blame it on the sleep delirium you happened to have when you started shopping.
Think about what the very name of the day implies. At one point in time, back before there was online banking, people would balance their checkbooks. When they hit negative numbers or losses they used red ink. If they made a profit, the accountants would use black ink.
The link between black ink and Black Friday should be apparent. So, if all of these stores are offering all these great sales, how are they still coming out in the positive? For me, it might just remain one of life’s unanswered questions.
It really just does not add up. If marking down the prices of these items is still making the stores a profit, then doesn’t that mean that the products are just regularly horribly over-priced?
There are other tactics they could use to beef up their sales numbers without dropping deviously low. Think about when you normally go shopping.
How often do you come out of Wal-Mart with just what was on your list? You know you normally come out with a cart full of products you did not actually intend to buy. I feel like I am doing great when I get out with only one or two extra things.
So my theory is that companies make a lot of extra money based on all the items that are not on sale.
It is always the season’s hottest toys, the ones that happen to be on sale, that go first. Why? It is because we really need all that stuff. Our parents want to make sure we are staying on top. After all, everyone has to keep up with their neighbors.
Think back a few years. “Tickle-Me-Elmo” might as well have had a monopoly on the children’s market. Where is Elmo now? Most of us probably stuffed him in a shoebox and hid him in our parents’ basements, hoping that rats would eventually carry him off if our parents did not get tired of him first.
I try not look at the past, though. We have a bright consumerist future just around the corner from us. Never mind the painstaking crowds, horribly long lines and early morning hours. When you have that half-price perfect gift in your hands, you’ll know just how important Black Friday is.