When Black Friday Comes

By Rod Dreher • November 23, 2012, 11:16 AM

The rise of #BlackFriday as an institution deepens my worries about America’s soul. #DecadenceWatch

— Gary Rosen (@garyrosenWSJ) November 23, 2012

Yes. That.

I hate this day. My mom was telling me yesterday about being in Wal-Mart on Black Friday a couple of years ago, and watching a shopper react badly to being told that she could not by three of that thing, that there was a limit of one per customer. The customer bit the Wal-Mart manager, who had to go to the hospital for treatment.

I agree with the angry liberal Lorraine Berry:

And so it is that much more dispiriting to see the holiday warped into a kind of mad consumer grab. “Black Friday” (which has now been pushed back to Thursday by itchy retailers) has become a national rallying cry: Spend more, save businesses, make your family happy. Everyone wins! And meanwhile, we ruin a whole class of workers’ Thanksgiving so we can save $10 on a piece of plastic crap, or bring home yet another piece of technology that we think will make our lives easier.

So consider this my stand for family values. Those aren’t really conservative values, you know. Because terrible things happen during these shopping sprees. Out-of-control mobs of frenzied shoppers can stampede into a Wal-Mart, leaving one worker dead and four injured. But each year the pressure to sell, to strap down employees for the full day, to grab hold of the wallets of those frenzied shoppers, becomes more intense.

This year, Target has gotten in on the Black Friday creep. Apparently no one in the management sees the dark irony in prominently posting the company’s goals on the website, which includes ”help[ing] Target team members and their families live healthy, balanced lives.” How does that square with making your workers give up their family holiday to cater to herds of shoppers?

Yes. I said “herd.” Because it is our own greed and shallow quest for things that have made the corporate decisions to stay open on Thanksgiving tenable. While I hold Kmart, Wal-Mart, and Target accountable for their horrendous decisions to encourage Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving Day, I hold us — the American consumer — responsible for buying into it.

On NPR yesterday, I heard an economic analyst saying that it’s only fair that “brick-and-mortar stores” open for sales on Thanksgiving, because online outlets are open then, and the brick-and-mortar guys have to be able to compete.

You know what? Black Friday, and what Black Friday represents, make shopping in brick-and-mortar stores so incredibly unpleasant and even depressing that we do almost all our Christmas shopping online.

There is something really, really wrong with a culture that compels retail workers to give up their holidays with their family for the sake of commerce. When we were in France last month, it was annoying to have so many stores closed on certain days, or closing at hours inconvenient to my shopping impulses. But I find that more civilized, and wish we had something like that here. Aside from the hardship our shopping extremism imposes on retail workers on holidays, it does something dirty to our own souls. Three days before Thanksgiving, I saw a news report showing Black Friday shoppers camping outside a Best Buy in California. That’s sick. If that’s you, then something is seriously wrong with you.

Posted in Consumerism, Economics. Tagged Black Friday, Thanksgiving.

57 Responses to When Black Friday Comes

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Franklin Evans says:

November 24, 2012 at 2:41 pm

Paul, yours is the first post I’ve seen in this mega-thread about employment, employment practices and the attempt to frame it as a moral question. Please take my response in the spirit of exploration… which I state here because this is one of those few topics on which I was passionate. In no particular order:

1) “Conditions of employment” is a very clear and simple way to label this. With your point is the rest of the reality, a picture of practical effects and facts. Walmart demonstrably forces smaller businesses to close or relocate from a simple inability to compete with them. In an employment market, for a class of jobs, if there is only one employer there is no hesitation to refer to aspects of their conditions of employment as coercion of the employees. They have a single recourse — quit and work elsewhere — and when their is no “elsewhere” they are being forced. Your military analogy is false, even prior to our all-volunteer service: One can be forced to be a soldier, ’tis true, but once there the terms of service (can’t call it conditions of employment) are also a series of coercive statements. The volunteer agrees to them of his or her own free will, the conscript does not consent to be there, but that is the only difference. Your child’s eating habits are an even worse analogy, but I’ll leave that one for another time.

2) No, neither Walmart nor any other employer can be passively coerced. In the absence of laws for that purpose, they are free to use business practices of their choice. I refer you now to the early Industrial-era “company town”, out of which the early union movements were motivated. I ask you, sincerely and bluntly: If we can show proof that the vast majority of employers are not going to treat their employees humanely, please offer me an alternative to laws and punishments to “coerce” them to set and practice moral business practices? I assure you, the Department of Labor, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and various state attorneys general have a continuing case load of companies who violate existing laws. Can you say with a straight face that it would not be worse without those laws and their enforcing agencies?

I stand with the use of social sanctions before even thinking about passing laws. In this case, given the inordinate gap in power between an employer and those seeking jobs, and further given the fact that “local employers” has become an oxymoron, I believe we have no choice to but to take the negative, cynical view and not trust them.
John Jay Chapman says:

November 24, 2012 at 2:55 pm

“I ‘force’ my son to eat his vegetables, for if he refuses I withhold other food, and in the worst cases might spank him…”

At which point, I ceased reading, with thanks to the writer for saving me time on future threads I’d otherwise never get back.
David J. White says:

November 24, 2012 at 6:41 pm

As I wrote on this blog once in another context . . . .

Three words: We Are Rome.

Actually, not in this instance. The Romans had quite a few days on the calendar marked nefastus, i.e. a day of ill-omen, when public business might not be conducted, and presumably private business wasn’t a good idea, either.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

November 24, 2012 at 10:56 pm

It’s Saturday night, and I just found an on-line Black Friday item that I’ve wanted for a couple of years to get the dearest lady in my life for Christmas, or her birthday, marked down $80, which is over half the purchase price. But I didn’t keep anyone at their cash register on Thanksgiving Day to find it.

I expect this will continue for the next two months. Like Rebecca Trotter said, the money doesn’t turn into a pumpkin if you fail to spend it by midnight.

But I DO blame the Walton’s. If they closed their stores for the holiday, nobody would be lining up waiting to get in.
Paul says:

November 25, 2012 at 9:51 am

Mr. Evans: Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I will offer the following to further clarify the sources of our disagreement, in response to your numbered points.

(1a) “Wal-Mart demonstrably forces smaller businesses to close or relocate…” is a statement to which I cannot assent. I use the terms “force” and “coerce” univocally to mean “threaten or employ violent compulsion to do something unwilled by the target.” Wal-Mart may offer a selection of goods, in a certain range of prices, in a particular physical setting, which individuals, acting as customers, choose over smaller businesses because they view them as better overall. It may be that the vast majority of people in a given locale make this choice for the vast majority of their shopping trips. In this situation, the smaller businesses will operate at a loss; unless they are operated for recreational purposes by independently wealthy proprietors, a sustained by the donations of friendly parties, this means that they will close. But Wal-Mart has not “forced” this outcome. Yes, its own efforts to make money have caused other similar efforts to fail. But the customers — that is, the individual people in the local society — are far more directly responsible for this failure. It is they who have withheld their custom from the smaller businesses and instead granted it to Wal-Mart; they could easily have done otherwise, choosing to impose some loss — tangible or intangible — on themselves rather than the small businesses. To use the term “force” equivocally to describe this situation is a feature of informal speech, but I argue that it confuses the nature of the issue in question. Laws against Wal-Mart, in this scenario, are just as directly aimed at depriving the customers of the possibility of choosing Wal-Mart — at preventing a situation in which they might make a choice that the legislators believe to be undesirable. Hence my earlier reference to paternalism.

(1b) “In an employment market, for a class of jobs, if there is only one employer there is no hesitation to refer to aspects of their conditions of employment as coercion of the employees. They have a single recourse — quit and work elsewhere — and when their [sic] is no ‘elsewhere’ they are being forced. ” The implicit assumption of these statements seems to be that employees are restricted to one “class of job,” hence my earlier citation of corporatism. Similarly, you write that the “only difference” between military conscripts and Wal-Mart employees is that the conscript does not consent to be there. I cannot agree, and offered the example not as an analogy, but as a contrast. If a military conscript says, “I quit” and walks away, he will be physically restrained, pursued, imprisoned, perhaps physically punished, and even, under some regimes, shot dead. These are all forms of coercion applied by the state in question. If a Wal-Mart employee does the same, Wal-Mart stops paying him, because the voluntary action of the employee has terminated an agreement into which both parties entered without being coerced. Now, at that point, the former employee may realize that he lacks alternate options which he personally judges superior to employment at Wal-Mart. He lacks the capacity to work as a physician or a civil engineer; he does not wish to take even less desirable employment, such as fry cookery or lawn mowing, even if such is available; he does not wish to migrate to some other society to seek employment agreements there; he does not wish to flee to the wilderness and live as a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farmer. Some of these options are denied by the confluence of circumstances, others forbidden by the force of state(s). Perhaps he has duties, such as the support of a family, which he cannot fulfill to his own satisfaction if he selects any of the available options. His freedom is limited by the reality of this situation, but this limit is not one imposed by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is not the source of his plight. Now, one might judge that Wal-Mart has the ability to offer a hypothetical employment agreement that he would find more attractive, and we would deem more praiseworthy — though whether it could do so and preserve itself so as to retain this ability is far from having been proven — and one might argue that it has the moral obligation to do so. But is this a moral obligation whose fulfillment we can coercively compel? If so, on what grounds — particularly under a supposedly religiously neutral liberal regime?

(1c) Similarly, I offered the example of the child and the vegetables as a contrast to the Wal-Mart employee, as well as to the customers who choose which business to patronize, not as an analogy to either. The difference being that parents are responsible for imparting to their children, during the years of their minority, the ability to make prudent and virtuous choices; doing this effectively requires, at times, imposing conditions against the child’s malformed will, depriving him of the ability to make particularly foolish or wicked choices, or punishing the exercise of those choices, so as to inculcate the wisdom to will in a better way. A state which is conceived as exercising this parental function in relation to its citizens, who are thereby reduced to puerility, is a paternalist one — a “nanny state,” in the popular phrase. But while the relationship between parents and child is natural to the human race, I would argue that equation of that relationship with that between the state and the citizen is a perversion of both bonds.

(2a) “No, neither Walmart nor any other employer can be passively coerced. In the absence of laws for that purpose, they are free to use business practices of their choice.” On this I must ask for clarification — do you mean that boycotts and public clamor cannot succeed in inducing employers to change their business practices? Surely if every member of society refused to engage in commerce with the offending employer, in most cases, he almost always would rapidly conclude that conceding society’s desire would be the best option available to him? Does not experience bear this out? I suggest that, in reality, most of the time, not enough of society really evidences enough of an objection to the practices to create conditions in which this is true. This is why, to cite the same history you do, strikes tended to devolve into violent clashes — the striking workers sought to forcibly prevent “scabs” from willingly accepting the same conditions that the strikers claimed were intolerable. Their actions were intended to change this situation so as to achieve the object of the strike by depriving the “scabs” of their free choice (and the employers of the option of hiring them), a choice that the strikers judged was morally wrong, a view which they failed to persuade the scabs to share. The same is true of the broad classes of legislation you describe, and many other besides: conceived of as measures taken against employers, they are simultaneously just as fully directed against any prospective employees who might judge that the prohibited working hours, wages, etc., are the most preferable among the options available to them, were their possibility not destroyed by the coercive power of the state.

(2b) “If we can show proof that the vast majority of employers are not going to treat their employees humanely, please offer me an alternative to laws and punishments to ‘coerce’ them to set and practice moral business practices?” I do not concede that we can show proof that the vast majority of employers are not going to treat their employees “humanely.” The history you cite certainly does not constitute proof of the vast claim implied by that statement. I do agree that the only way to ensure that the vast majority of employers conform their actions to my own moral and aesthetic judgments in every detail with which I concern myself is for me to rule over them by force, but I do not believe that my attempting to do so is moral in itself.

(2c) “I assure you, [various agencies] have a continuing case load of companies who violate existing laws.” No doubt they do; this in itself demonstrates nothing about the value of such laws. “Can you say with a straight face that it would not be worse without those laws…?” Worse by what standard of judgement, exactly? Worse in a way that justifies coercive violence to prevent? Worse than alternate arrangements that might have arisen, had not the existing one been imposed by force? I offer these non-answers not as a comprehensive reply, but as a pointer to the almost-never-articulated, and thence unargued, assumptions of the modern worldview in its liberal guise. I would point out that the reason that these assumptions are never articulated and defended is that they go hand-in-hand with an also-unspoken modern metaphysics in which it is not possible to consistently defend them.

(3a) “In this case, given the inordinate gap in power between an employer and those seeking jobs…” Predictably, I will again protest the equivocal way in which “power” is employed here. In the “power” to propose and fulfill terms for voluntary agreement, and to decline an agreement when the terms are not acceptable, Wal-Mart and the employee are indeed disparate. But this “power” is better characterized ability or capacity, to avoid confusion with the specific capacity to resort to coercive violence and enjoyed by the state.

(3b) “I believe we have no choice to but to take the negative, cynical view and not trust them.” Once more, this is not the only choice that we have. It may be the only choice that we are willing to accept, but then this begs the question of why this is so.
Paul says:

November 25, 2012 at 9:57 am

Mr. Chapman: your literally fallacious reply is beneath contempt; I can only hope that it expresses an emotional reaction, and does not typify your intellectual character.
James Kabala says:

November 25, 2012 at 4:06 pm

“16% of people planned to shop in Thanksgiving and 33% planned to shop on Black Friday”

And I suspect that even among the third that intended to shop on Friday, most planned to do so at ordinary hours, not midnight or 1 A.M. I think there is a moral lesson here, but it is “Media hype creates false perceptions,” not “Americans are too consumerist.” (Although the latter may separately be true!)