By Dan Nelson
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Thanksgiving has been praised as the one holiday most resistant to the commercialism virus. There is nothing to sell consumers except turkey and instant stuffing, candy and presents are not exchanged, and Thanksgiving Day card purchases are still isolated to bored elderly women. That is not to say that the holiday doesn’t hold a special place in the retail universe. Thanksgiving’s commercial glory is derived from the coattails of Christmas and the shopping extravaganza it inaugurates every year on Yuletide’s behalf.
This is the time of year when Americans are given their annual guilt trip to spend, spend, spend, or else the economy will evaporate, we’ll all lose our jobs, and the Communists will take over. News anchors tell us how retailers need us to spend more money than last year, and every holiday season, we do our best to comply. And why shouldn’t we? I enjoy shopping for, as well as receiving, stuff. After Christmas, I love returning misguided stuff purchased by unfamiliar relatives and then buying new stuff all over again. This is the engine of our society. It would be hypocritical for anyone in America to criticize our country’s consumer culture and still enjoy the luxuries that all this purchasing of stuff has given us. The benefits of capitalism spill over to all aspects of Americans’ lives; people who think that they are free from capitalism’s influence just because they don’t buy Starbucks coffee and drive a hybrid vehicle are only fooling themselves. There are always cranks who are trying to prove otherwise, however. After years of being forced to watch countless Charlie Brown Christmas specials, some Americans have formed a love-hate relationship with this country’s rampant commercialism. Anticonsumer groups are always quick to exhibit a few very large flaws in our buy-everything, think-later system, and I’m sad to say that it is not always disaffected drivel.
The first problem, the one least observable to people in this country, is where most of this holiday junk originates. The majority of it was most likely produced in foreign countries by companies exploiting third-world work forces. This should be a tragic and persuasive argument for the anti-consumerist, but as long as the exploitation is occurring out of sight and oversees, most Americans will ignore it.
The second problem with purchasing so many things is where the material used to make the stuff comes from and where the stuff ends up. Starting in grade school, we have all been exposed to dreadful time-lapse movies of landfills growing and rainforests shrinking, but the message seems to get lost somewhere after eighth grade. Just as consumers are able to shrug off the slave labor used to make their products, most Americans will pay no attention to environmental devastation until the landfill reaches their own backyards.
Even though I am aware of the deleterious effects of consumerism, I will still buy (and receive) way too much this Christmas. With anti-consumerists fighting such an obvious losing battle, it seems silly for groups such as Adbusters to proclaim, as I’m sure they do every year, November 29th to be “Buy Nothing Day.” I am sure that the majority of this new holiday’s observers are already members of organizations such as Adbusters, and the celebration will win few new converts. It can also be debated that, given our nation’s current soft economy, whether asking people to give up buying cold turkey may be the wisest endeavor.
Yet how much do we really need to spend, and where is this spendthrift road taking us? It is a bit overoptimistic for retailers to expect consumers to spend more every year; eventually there must be a limit to how much we need. Contrary to what the anti-consumerists may want you to believe, we are not all mere robots being ordered to spend by the large conglomerates. We will stop spending more when it stops being pleasurable. When will that pinnacle of maximum spending be reached, and what effect will it have on our economy? I’m sure that on the following day, most Americans will still have their jobs.
This year, I was an unwitting celebrator of Buy Nothing Day, and perhaps this is the most anti-consumerists can hope for. We are material addicts. Americans are not about to give up their buying fix; the only end in sight is when they have become satiated on their own possessions.
