Recovering From Thanksgiving

On Black Friday (so named because retailers are supposed to break into the black that day), a door guard at a Wal-Mart on Long Island was trampled to death by 2000 anxious customers. They broke the door down just before opening time and went right over top of him. Anyone who tried to help was also trampled—and hospitalized.
After all, only 50 of this or that item on sale—only for as long as they last. There’s something about a limited sale that seems to bring out a truly savage lust in us. We’ll get one of those fifty if we have to sit out all night, and we’re perfectly happy to kill doing it.
What an exquisite commentary on the modern American Thanksgiving. Forget the Pilgrims—fifty percent of whom had died of hunger and disease the winter before—who were just grateful to be alive. Forget the Indians who brought five deer for the feast and stayed for days.
We pack it all into one day now. We have to: tomorrow has the best sales of the year and we have to be up by three or four. Stuff the turkey, stuff ourselves, watch the hapless Detroit Lions play middle school football against pros, and stampede for the gold. Whatever is fifty or more percent off.
I’ve talked to people who managed to hit four or five stores on Black Friday morning. I’m sure that’s nowhere near a record. (If you need to grocery shop that day, go about five o’clock in the evening. Most shoppers have collapsed in exhaustion by then and the store is reasonably empty.)
Is there any correlation between this lust for a bargain—at any human cost—and what’s going on over at the stock exchange these days? Do Wall Street and Wal-Mart have anything in common? Are the people who shop for that 50% off TV anything like the people who madly bought leveraged bundles of highly questionable mortgage papers?
As I’ve said in previous blogs, the problem scarcely began on Wall Street. Those are our kids down there. We taught them how to fudge, how to grasp and how to be completely ruthless in getting what they want. They just took the lessons they learned at home—and Wal-Mart—and applied them to those good jobs they got just out of B-school.
You can be appalled at what went on in the financial markets, but just remember where they first learned greed—at the Mall. In company with mommy and daddy and, later, in company only with mom and dad’s credit card. They didn’t come by it, as if newly sprung from Minerva’s brow, once they hit the Street.
Is there ever a day of actual thanksgiving for them? Do they know the meaning? (I admit, my son complains bitterly because he “hates” turkey.) Do any of us know the meaning? When was the last time most of us were hungry like the Pilgrims?
When was the last time we lay, staring death in the face, surrounded by those who had already died? The Pilgrims, scratching out a living on a strange new continent, months from the closest help, felt they had something to be truly thankful for.
They had plenty to be scared of, but they didn’t concentrate on it. They were thankful for survival. We’re scared because we might lose a bonus, a job, or a vastly overpriced house (remember when what sells for about $250-300 thousand today sold for $35 to $50 thousand? I remember when an $80K house was one whale of a house!). That’s all we can think about.
Take a moment to feel sorry for the door guard on Long Island. He died to make retail profitable—in some executives’ minds that’s as worthy a cause as dying to keep democracy safe. (After all, it was our own president who told us the best and most patriotic response to the 911 assault would be to go out and shop!) So feel as sorry for his family as you might for any dead soldier’s.
Then wonder—just as you wonder what kind of person flies a plane into the World Trade Center—what kind of shopper tramples a man to death and then rushes on to keep shopping.
God help us, they’re not all that different.