Too Good Not to Share
Found this at Slate and had to repost here. I say "here here!" and "It's about damn time!" :)
It Is Time To Outlaw Black Friday
Posted Friday, November 28, 2008 8:05 PM | By Moe Tkacik
Numbers are supposed to explain everything that happens in the economy, and there are numbers that can help illustrate why a couple thousand people assembled in a Long Island parking lot were so hellbent on out-consuming one another that they were not above stepping on a thirtysomething overnight stock worker named Jdimytai Damour as he literally lay dying. While same-store sales are projected to fall nearly 7% this year from last across America's retailers, Wal-Mart is expected to outperform its peers by 9 percentage points. While the end result for Wal-Mart is only a 2% gain over last year's sales, the trajectory, relative to the rest of retail-land, and the rest of the economy, and the plunging net worths of everyone with a house or a retirement plan, and the general sense that those trends can only over the next few quarters and years continue, is impressive. Here is how impressive: many Wal-Marts reportedly ran out of cash to make change before banks opened! Cash, which people are using allegedly because the credit crisis has cut off people from debt -- but have these people never heard of debit cards? Are they so overstretched that their bank accounts have been snowed under by dozens of overdraft fees? (Hey, I've been there!) But if that's the case, what the hell, in this economy, are they doing buying anything -- much less leaving the house after a 3,000 calorie meal to line up in the cold for twelve hours to buy it?
I have been on the Black Friday beat before, when I covered retail for the Wall Street Journal, and my sense was always that people shopped on Black Friday because it was Black Friday. It was, like holidays and sporting events, a tradition. The sales were often no better than they were in the desperate days before Christmas, days which are sure to be direly desperate this year. Truly price-sensitive consumers often found better deals on the internet, and anyway, truly rational price-sensitive consumers recognize the opportunity cost of all that sitting out in a cold exurban parking lots is way too steep when considered against those same hours spent working time and a half. Nope, it was tradition -- a distinctly so-grotesque-as-to-have-become-a-parody-of-itself one, like eating contests or bull fights or American Idol auditions, perhaps, but a tradition nonetheless. And traditions, while comfortable, are in no way rational. The populace will take much longer to discard them than is necessarily efficient.
Which underscores a larger point about this sickening tragedy, and sales. Retailers and the market shy away from making grand pronouncements on the basis of isolated events, but maybe here our lawmakers can show leadership: maybe ban Black Friday -- by forcing retailers to make all Black Friday prices, or all prices selling merchandise below wholesale cost, available on the internet, since all these hard-core "loss-leader" tactics to drive traffic to stores only really serves to whip shoppers into an irrational frenzy which is only dubiously justified by any profit it generates. I would venture not a single person working in retail anywhere on the totem pole really likes Black Friday for anything other than psycho-sentimental reasons. It's a pain, it's cutthroat, it's subject to an absurd degree of Wall Street scrutiny and you end up losing money on the vast majority of the products whose prices you slash only to pray you make it back before December 24. It is, in other words, irrational, and by extension inefficient.
Until recently sales were highly regulated in much of Europe, confined to certain seasons, something American retail executives found socialistic but which actually had the effect of minimizing waste, creating retailers like H&M that controlled their inventory tightly and were capable of delivering merchandise on an as-needed "just in time" regular replenishment schedule, so that no one got stuck trying to offload 16,000 green checked leotards that bombed on the store shelves or whatever. As a result of these laws and other factors, consumption culture in Europe was and remains comparatively civil. And while there are many things the world needs now, civility is not a bad start.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor/archive/2008/11/28/it-is-time-to-outlaw-black-friday.aspx?GT1=38001
It Is Time To Outlaw Black Friday
Posted Friday, November 28, 2008 8:05 PM | By Moe Tkacik
Numbers are supposed to explain everything that happens in the economy, and there are numbers that can help illustrate why a couple thousand people assembled in a Long Island parking lot were so hellbent on out-consuming one another that they were not above stepping on a thirtysomething overnight stock worker named Jdimytai Damour as he literally lay dying. While same-store sales are projected to fall nearly 7% this year from last across America's retailers, Wal-Mart is expected to outperform its peers by 9 percentage points. While the end result for Wal-Mart is only a 2% gain over last year's sales, the trajectory, relative to the rest of retail-land, and the rest of the economy, and the plunging net worths of everyone with a house or a retirement plan, and the general sense that those trends can only over the next few quarters and years continue, is impressive. Here is how impressive: many Wal-Marts reportedly ran out of cash to make change before banks opened! Cash, which people are using allegedly because the credit crisis has cut off people from debt -- but have these people never heard of debit cards? Are they so overstretched that their bank accounts have been snowed under by dozens of overdraft fees? (Hey, I've been there!) But if that's the case, what the hell, in this economy, are they doing buying anything -- much less leaving the house after a 3,000 calorie meal to line up in the cold for twelve hours to buy it?
I have been on the Black Friday beat before, when I covered retail for the Wall Street Journal, and my sense was always that people shopped on Black Friday because it was Black Friday. It was, like holidays and sporting events, a tradition. The sales were often no better than they were in the desperate days before Christmas, days which are sure to be direly desperate this year. Truly price-sensitive consumers often found better deals on the internet, and anyway, truly rational price-sensitive consumers recognize the opportunity cost of all that sitting out in a cold exurban parking lots is way too steep when considered against those same hours spent working time and a half. Nope, it was tradition -- a distinctly so-grotesque-as-to-have-become-a-parody-of-itself one, like eating contests or bull fights or American Idol auditions, perhaps, but a tradition nonetheless. And traditions, while comfortable, are in no way rational. The populace will take much longer to discard them than is necessarily efficient.
Which underscores a larger point about this sickening tragedy, and sales. Retailers and the market shy away from making grand pronouncements on the basis of isolated events, but maybe here our lawmakers can show leadership: maybe ban Black Friday -- by forcing retailers to make all Black Friday prices, or all prices selling merchandise below wholesale cost, available on the internet, since all these hard-core "loss-leader" tactics to drive traffic to stores only really serves to whip shoppers into an irrational frenzy which is only dubiously justified by any profit it generates. I would venture not a single person working in retail anywhere on the totem pole really likes Black Friday for anything other than psycho-sentimental reasons. It's a pain, it's cutthroat, it's subject to an absurd degree of Wall Street scrutiny and you end up losing money on the vast majority of the products whose prices you slash only to pray you make it back before December 24. It is, in other words, irrational, and by extension inefficient.
Until recently sales were highly regulated in much of Europe, confined to certain seasons, something American retail executives found socialistic but which actually had the effect of minimizing waste, creating retailers like H&M that controlled their inventory tightly and were capable of delivering merchandise on an as-needed "just in time" regular replenishment schedule, so that no one got stuck trying to offload 16,000 green checked leotards that bombed on the store shelves or whatever. As a result of these laws and other factors, consumption culture in Europe was and remains comparatively civil. And while there are many things the world needs now, civility is not a bad start.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor/archive/2008/11/28/it-is-time-to-outlaw-black-friday.aspx?GT1=38001