After finishing their succulent Thanksgiving dinners last Thursday, Americans piled into their cars and drove down to the local mall. In the great American tradition, their pumpkin pies would be topped off with some spending in the most inane of American holidays: Black Friday.
From Norman Rockwell to Sam Walton in a matter of hours.
This past Friday truly earned its macabre name by tragically taking its first life. At 4:55 a.m. at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y., Wal-Mart temp Jdimytai Damour, 34, was stampeded to death by Black Friday revelers. The crowd of over 2,000 hounded the entrance, and it didn’t look like they’d be able to wait the last five minutes for the official opening time of 5 a.m. Employees tried to push back on the bulging glass, but when the tsunami was stronger than the dike, the doors shattered and deal-seekers stampeded victorious into the superstore, taking Damour’s life with them. The shoppers were out of control, everyone fearing they would be the one to get to the Apple rack as the last iPod left the shelf, or some such hysteria.
Wal-Mart has been one of the few companies (along with Campbell’s Soup) that has benefited from American economic destitution, as consumers are forced to switch to lower-priced goods. There is an inexplicably ingrained American idea that consumerism and the holidays go hand in hand, and so while most people have accepted that a new house isn’t on the horizon, the pressure to find the lowest-priced consumer goods has shot up. This is evidenced by the bedlam of this year’s Black Friday, for which initial reports indicate that spending was up 3 percent over last year.
Black Friday shoppers apparently feel that by getting up at the crack of dawn (though usually before) and standing in huge crowds at the shopping mall, they are somehow working the system — working hard for the dirt-cheap prices. The reality, of course, is that Black Friday is an orchestrated affair, designed not as a charity event but as a way to get implausible numbers of people to converge en masse and spend, spend, spend. And in theory, spending is just the fix our cash-dry economy is in need of. But the reality is that Americans simply don’t have any cash — and what they do have they are too afraid to spend. As Thomas Friedman has said, “I’m going to save, but you should go spend.”
The economic downturn is definitely not the first thing on the minds of Jdimytai Damour’s family, but the connection between cash-strapped consumers and his death is indubitable. Unfortunately, the increase in Black Friday spending from last year is most likely a red herring: an indication that customers are merely going to greater lengths to find the lowest price, shifting the shopping they would have normally done over the next month to last Friday. The danger, of course, is that anxious customers make for negligent, even dangerous, customers, and that’s when tragedy ensues.