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| Letter From America: Shop or We’ll Drop | | | | Are shopping and family values one in the same thing in America? | | | By Gersh Kuntzman
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL |
| | | Dec. 16 issue — Americans are nervous about the economy right now. Unemployment is ticking upward, wages are down and the stock market is performing like a once great Olympic sprinter who just turned 60 and had a hip replacement. Which raises an important question: what in the world am I going to get my father for Christmas? |
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UNRELATED THOUGHTS? NOT in America, where the health of the national economy is critically dependent on having all of us spend as much as we can to keep struggling retailers afloat, create jobs and generate capital. Consumption is such a vital part of the American economy—it long ago superseded good old-fashioned manufacturing—that the most closely watched economic indicator is something called “consumer confidence,” a vague notion that probably can’t even be measured accurately.
Whenever consumer confidence plunges, as it did after the great Internet bust of 2000 or after the September 11 attacks, government officials are sent scurrying to the airwaves to say there’s no reason to panic so long as everyone does his patriotic duty and shops. Remember how New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, responded when asked how Americans could help New York in the days just after the attacks? He didn’t say, “Donate to the Red Cross,” or “Go to church and pray for our wounded city.” He told them to “come to New York and spend money.”
Only in America are the holidays covered in the business pages. From the day after Thanksgiving—by repute, the busiest shopping day of the year—through the hours before Christmas Day, there are daily reports of the vigor of shoppers, updates that read like the medical chart of a particularly difficult patient. And companies aren’t ashamed to exploit seasonal sentimentality, either. One of our top retailers, the already bankrupt Kmart, has made clear that it’ll go under entirely if this shopping season isn’t a big success. So patriotic Americans know what to do to rescue this 100-year-old company and save tens of thousands of jobs. Spend, spend, spend.
I’m not usually a cynic. I love this season from the first chill in the air all the way until the credit-card bills come due in February. There’s nothing like the joy of buying a cherished friend that hard-to-find gift or receiving something that you’ve wanted for months but didn’t have the nerve to buy for yourself. Like the rotary phone I got my wife last year. Totally retro.
But to enter a department store on the day after Thanksgiving—as I did in search of the aforementioned gift for Dad—is to experience the worst that humanity has to offer. Thanksgiving is our national holiday of food consumption, so I guess it’s appropriate that our national holiday of conspicuous consumption is the next day. Watching Americans shop on the so-called Black Friday is to see people pushing each other as they rush from product to product, grabbing for DVD players or rewritable disk drives, even though they’ll probably never figure out how to use them.
I’m just as guilty as anyone, which is why I found myself amid a scrum in the digital-camera section of a local department store. All around me, customers asked each other questions about the various cameras on sale. Of course, there were no salespeople to be found, because hiring extra holiday help would cut into the store’s already razor-thin margins.
Now, my father does not need a digital camera. He has never shown any inclination toward capturing life’s “precious moments” and doesn’t even pose for travel photos standing in front of Important World Monuments. But around Christmas, that’s irrelevant. You get so caught up in Shopping that you don’t even think about the purchases you make. The goal is just to buy something... anything—functional or not, desired or not, affordable or not. Who cares if the gift doesn’t have meaning to the person who will receive it? It’s a Christmas present, not some kind of token of your genuine affection, right?
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Newsweek International December 16th Issue
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So I bought the camera and gave it to my father last week for Chanukah. (Xmas, Chanukah. If you’re Jewish in New York, whassa difference?) I set up the software on his computer, and he seemed pleased. Still, I was left with the feeling that I’d been complicit in a process by which love is commodified, put in a box with a ribbon and handed over with all the emotion of two spies silently switching cash-filled briefcases.
I thought I had done my patriotic duty, but an hour later I got a call from him, telling me that the camera appeared to be malfunctioning. Now I know where I’ll be spending my New Year’s Day—home with him, fixing the problem. Maybe conspicuous, egregious, unnecessary consumption does bring families closer, after all.
Kuntzman is a columnist for the New York Post.
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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Muhammad Atta's Neighborhood
