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Black Friday (aka Buy Nothing Day)
Today is called "Black Friday," the big shopping day after Thanksgiving which initiates the push for Christmas spending. Our economy is dependent on consumer spending, and despite the economic meltdown, people rush out to shop frantically. Already, a Walmart employee was trampled and and there was a shooting at a Toys R Us. It's also an odd name, since we're "in the red" economically, and "Black Friday" has also been used to commemorate big drops in the stock markets which occur on Friday.
Today is also Buy Nothing Day, as commemorated in the photo below taken in Japan and shown in the video. It's a conception of AdBusters, which is a network of 80,650 "culturejammers" who use performance to raise awareness. They have their magazine, and also a number of "campaigns" at any given time.
They say:
As the planet starts heating up, maybe it’s time to finally go cold turkey. Take the personal challenge by locking up your debit card, your credit cards, your money clip, and see what it feels like to opt out of consumer culture completely, even if only for 24 hours. Like the millions of people who have done this fast before you, you may be rewarded with a life-changing epiphany. While you’re at it, what better time to point out real alternatives to unbridled consumption – and the climate uncertainty that it entails – by taking your BND spirit to the streets?
Buy Nothing Day is celebrated internationally, and some of the ideas include the following:
Credit card cut up
Volunteers stand in a shopping mall with a pair of scissors and a sign offering a simple service: to put an end to extortionate interest rates and mounting debt with one considerate cut. Be careful though: in some first-world countries, carrying scissors in public can get you arrested as a “terrorist”.
Zombie Walk
The cheerful dead wander around malls, marveling at the blank, comatose expressions on the faces of shoppers. The zombies are happy to be among their own kind, but slightly contemptuous of those who have not yet begun to rot.
Whirl–mart
This activity has the advantage of being most likely to piss off security personnel. You and nine of your closest friends silently drive your shopping carts around in a long, inexplicable conga line without ever actually buying anything.
Granted, some of us want to buy gifts or find bargains, but it's nice to know that there is some thought and practice going on away from the direction of mindless consumerism.
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With the planet / dwarf planet (call it whatever you wish) Pluto now sitting at 0 Capricorn, on what astrologers call the world axis, we have today an incident that is an telling an indictment of America's consumerist character as any I can imagine.
A Walmart employee dies in a stampede of voracious shoppers on a Black Friday morning. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to look in the mirror.
Scary, truly scary story.
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
By JACK HEALY and ANGELA MACROPOULOS
A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.
At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee, Jdimypai Damour, 34, of Jamaica, Queens, who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.
People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.
“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”
- more -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/business/29walmart.html?_r=1&hp
There was also a Toys R Us shooting today in California
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/28/socal-toys-r-us-shooting_n_147032.html
"He was killed to save a few dollars. They didn't have to do it; there were more than enough TVs to go around," said Stephen Manning, 20. "He was here only four days. Last year, they only bent the door. People are insane."
"The cops, too, were left shaking their heads."
"It's a sad commentary on humanity. It was complete chaos," Fleming said.
"Dozens of others were knocked down in the frenzy, including a 28-year-old woman who was eight months' pregnant, authorities said. She was hospitalized at South Nassau Communities Hospital. Police said both she and her unborn baby were OK. At least three others were treated at local hospitals."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/11292008/news/regionalnews/killer_tide_at_shop_of_horror_141344.htm