Black Friday…A Prime Example of What America’s Priorities Are

Another Thanksgiving has passed and families all over the U.S. have made their travels to be with family and stuff their faces with obscene amounts of food. Millions of dollars have been spent on food and gasoline. Thanksgiving is a great holiday don’t get me wrong, but it definitely takes a toll on our environment; mass consuming of food from the industrial food chain and subsequent CO2 output. What is even better is Black Friday, literally what has grown into an annual American tradition every morning after Thanksgiving associated with hordes of people scrambling to stores and fighting for the best deals. I feel like people don’t even really need the things they are fighting to get a hold of and purchase, but just because it’s cheap, brainwashed by corporate America. People are trapped in a society where materialistic items are a priority.

What I’ve learned is that people even in a recession will get their kids what they struggle to get their kids what they want to make them happy. People become so crazed and bent on getting what they set out to get that injury and violence even occurs. Last year for example, the door man for the Walmart in Valley Stream, NY, was trampled and killed by the stampede of people that rushed through the doors when he opened them. No one slowed down to help him, just continued to pressure on through like everyone else, leaving him helpless on the ground. This just goes to show you some of the morals and ethics of people are at. And apparently a sale on a toy, TV, or new gaming system is valued more than a human life.

In an interesting article I came across, eBay published an animated graphic displaying "Black Friday" sales on a map of the United States. “1,027,807 U.S. transactions are displayed on the map with two dots per transaction - one for the seller and one for the buyer…based on eBay sales occurring on November 27, 2009” (Steiner).

Spending at retail stores on Black Friday according to ShopperTrak, increased 0.5 percent from that of the previous year in 2008, which was a total of $10.660 billion as compared to $10.606 billion on Black Friday 2008. (Steiner) Regardless of how sleight the increase, I still find this fact quite profound being that we are in a recession and current environmental situation. What this tells me is that people still have not yet taken any of it seriously. A perfect example of waiting until it is too late. People are clearly ignorant to current crises. $10.660 billion dollars spent in one day! Here’s the kicker, according to Yahoo's "12 Weeks of Christmas" consumer survey conducted by Decipher, Inc. in October, “Nearly 90% of Americans polled will be using the Internet for shopping/researching and more than 70% will use it to purchase gifts this year” (Steiner). That tells me that only about 30% of this year’s shoppers have even participated in the Black Friday event, and that there is still a tremendous amount of spending to come before the Holiday Season comes to an end.

To add to the sad but true fact that many Americans have transformed our holidays into days for people to go out and shop ‘while sales last,’ rather than practice the true meaning of the holiday, and recognize its purpose. A great example of this is the release of the new game called “Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.” “Activision Blizzard Inc said it sold 4.7 million copies of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2", or $310 million of sales, on its first day, setting a new record for the video game industry in North America and the UK alone” (‘Call of Duty’). The game also was released the night before Veteran’s Day on November 10, 2009, subsequently people had lined up for hours outside retail stores like GameStop in advance to get their hands on it. I’m sure all of these people were very concerned about honoring their troops the next day, not. Where have our values gone. From class one of the students mentioned a quote from the movie Fight Club that I really liked that went something like this, “What you own ends up owning you.” Very true unfortunately.

Resources

"'Call of Duty' Brings in More Than $300M." abc News Money abcNEWS.com, Nov. 2009. Web. 28 Nov. 2009. .

Steiner, Ina. "eBay Plots 1 Million Transactions on Black Friday Map." Auction Bytes The Independent Trade Publication for Online Merchants Ed. Ina Steiner. Perl Web Blog, Nov. 2009. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. .