Wal-Mart Employee Trampled To Death By Customers
Today is Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and it is conventionally known as Black Friday. That means that this is the day most retailers go from red to black, turning their first overall significant profits. Today is normally the busiest shopping day of the year, as people rush out for holiday sales in anticipation of Christmas.
Today is also Buy Nothing Day, a holiday declared in opposition to the disgusting consumerist nightmare holiday season has become.
At Monkeywrench we're in a strange bind. On the one hand, we are a retailer, and while we would love nothing so much as to just give these books away, we're fairly certain our book distributors would stop sending us titles if we stopped giving them money. We're all nerdy enough to work for free at this place, but rent is still rent, inventory still costs money, and we want to sell our wares as much as anyone. So please come on by and check out what we're carrying, because I feel confident in saying we have some of the most enlightening reads you'll find anywhere in our fair city.
That being said, if you happen to go by the store today you'll notice that we're closed, on what is once again the busiest shopping day of the year. There are a few reasons for this, including some crass ones- we don't actually get a lot of sales on this day and people are not eager to volunteer on the Friday after Thanksgiving. But the real reason we don't is that we're maintaining Buy Nothing Day. As is pretty obvious by the nature of our store, we care more about the values embedded in the stuff we sell and how we sell it than in just making a buck. Buy Nothing Day is not the most effective critique of consumerism, but it's something, and in American culture as we now have it something is better than nothing.
Some have pointed out that this year the whole point is a little silly, since retail sales are expected to be way, way down anyway. So just t point out, they're still high enough to enable this sort of madness:
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled To Death By Customers
So to prepare for Christmas a few thousand New Yorkers trample a temp employee to death looking for game systems. Human brutality is omnipresent and always horrifying, but that people regularly die during mobs of shopping sales is pathetic, wretched.
I personally prefer Buy Nothing Day. Relatively speaking this sort of consumerist sickness seems like a minor matter. But when big business successfully seduces people into becoming thoughtless mobs driven by a 30% discount on trinkets, I am ashamed to be human.
The world round us is full of glory and beauty if we look for it, but we will never see it as long as we worship these tin gods.
Happy holidays.