Black Friday: We've Created Our Own Demise...

November 25, 2011

Black Friday: We've Created Our Own Demise...

The efficiencies that we've developed over the past 100 or so years in manufacturing and marketing have created a level of lifestyle quality that is incredible for most people in developed countries. There are poor among us, but even the people in pretty poor circumstances are generally much better off than their counterparts a century ago. Your life may not seem amazing, but thing of how someone transported to your house from 100 years ago would think you must be a god to live the way we live today.

This post was inspired by two things: my discomfort with big retailers backing up "black Friday" into Thanksgiving evening, and a very short but good post that Seth Godin posted on Thanksgiving: A great way to give thanks....

The thing about business that most professional politicians and most people in academia never get is that businesses are created for one reason and one reason only: to make money... to make a profit. Businesses are not necessarily concerned with the long-range social implications of their marketing strategies or product offerings - they're concerned with making payroll and having some cash left over for profit.

As businesses competed and found better ways to produce their products and sell their products they exploited physics, science, ergonomics, psychology, as well as basic human nature. That's not a bad thing, business is not evil.

But just as technology progresses at a logarithmic pace, so does the down-side of all this progress in production and marketing. A good portion of the buying public has been reduced to mice in a maze, or, Pavlov's dog. Like Pavlov ringing that bell to make the dog slobber, retailers pull out discounts of desperation to fill their stores with supposedly sane people at 10pm or midnight on Thanksgiving night. And it works - people fight for their place in line and act like animals.

So what's wrong with this? The problem is that this is indicative of the decline of independence and common sense in our society. We've become slaves to merchandisers, governments, and the media. They ring the bell, we slobber and beg. They say it's blue and a good portion of the population will agree that's its blue even when it's obviously red.

I don't think that there's anything really wrong with a store opening at 10pm on Thanksgiving night and offering crazy discounts, as long as it pans out for the store in the long run. But this dog will not slobber when that bell goes ding! In fact, I think it should work the other way around, I think the retailer should slobber when we ring the bell!

Double Barreled Opinions

Black Friday: We've Created Our Own Demise...