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.
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