The Making of a Medley
Newsstand: November 23, 2009
Transit City and Transit Cities
The Daily Photoist: November 23, 2009
Today is Black Friday, the day most Americans take off work to begin their annual holiday shopping sprees and one of the busiest on the retail calendar. In a noteworthy bit of culture-jamming counter-programming, it has also recently been repackaged as Buy Nothing Day, an Adbusters-inspired occasion to refrain from shopping at all. Torontoist is not particularly impressed: most people will simply buy tomorrow what they forego buying today, and the net effect will be zilch. As we learned in an interview with The Rebel Sell author Andrew Potter, Buy Nothing Day doesn't really address the root of the problem with excess consumption, namely that we are all producers as well as consumers and thus have a hand in creating things that other people buy. If we want to make a real dent in the problem we all need to be willing to not just buy less but also produce, sell, and earn less, too.
So maybe we need to move further up the supply chain in order to make headway? Enter Sell Nothing Day, a venture by two local retailers designed to take Buying Nothing up a notch. They are shutting their doors for the day in support of a more enlightened approach to shopping. Of course, Torontoist learned this via the press release they so kindly sent us, thereby indicating that the participating stores view this temporary withdrawal from the marketplace as an event worth trumpeting—a marketing opportunity. Presumably, this might lead an ethically minded Torontonian to think, “Gee, these stores really care. Maybe I should go check them out.” And, quite possibly, you should. There is a real argument to be made in favour of spending your shopping dollars at independent retailers selling Canadian-made goods. (Torontoist has already gone on record: we actually like these stores.) But let's not be disingenuous about what’s going on here. If you think that there are better and worse kinds of consumption, then say so and explain why—please don’t operate under the pretence of rejecting consumerism as such.
Photo by avp17 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
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Everyday for me is buy only when you have to and try to avoid the busy days. The real sales tend to appear after these "shopping holidays". I remember going to a Futureshop on boxing day, seeing a game for $15, I came back the next day to see it priced as $15 but "Free with rebate". They love these days to get rid of old stock.
Toilet paper and bacon are on sale at Metro so yes, I will be shopping today.
"If you think that there are better and worse kinds of consumption, then say so and explain why—please don’t operate under the pretence [sic] of rejecting consumerism as such."
It needn't be a pretense. Genuinely rejecting consumerism (the ideology/mindset/theory/whatever) is entirely plausible without insisting that all kinds of "consumption" are bad.
There's consumption, and then there's consumerism. They're as conceptually distinct as capital and capitalism, Islam and Islamism, etc.
Consumerism is the notion that growth in the consumption of goods is desirable and worth promoting because of beneficial economic effects. Consumerism doesn't simply justify consumption, it justifies ever-intensifying consumption -- no longer only because it means more economic activity, but now driven (thanks, marketing!) by the idea that the more you buy the happier you'll be.
Consumption is generally good when it effective satisfies a genuine endogenously-arising need without creating unwarranted additional needs, and generally bad when it either fails to satisfy a genuine need or satisfies an exogenously-arising (i.e. marketing-driven) need that was created by suppliers of otherwise surplus goods for the sole purpose of stimulating consumer demand. There's a whole world of demand for goods and services to fulfill unmet genuine needs, and diverting resources to consumption of superfluous goods through psychologically manipulative persuasion, while profitable, is wasteful and should not be sanctioned.
Whoops, I retract my "sic", pretence is better than pretense.