Is Wal-Mart the enemy?

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

It's been a week since the Wal-Mart strike of Black Friday. Strike, perhaps, is a misnomer. No one tried to stop sales at any Wal-Mart stores. There were no picket lines to cross. And the essence of a strike, to withhold labor, did not happen. These were protests organized to generate headlines on the most important shopping day of the year. And they did generate headlines. If that's all they did, then Wal-Mart won. If they are the start of something, the beginning of an organizing "marathon,” they will be a turning point. It's impossible to know now. Because what Wal-Mart really fears, strikes to shut down their ability to generate massive profits, isn't what the organizers are seeking. Black Friday did not show a real fight. It was like shadow boxing, or a test to gauge the strengths and weaknesses between workers and Wal-Mart.

I spent some time at one of these megastores last week, and what I really noticed were the kids. The best way to understand Christmas in modern America is to watch how children react to the intense marketing directed their way. Kids are the purest representation of our values, because they haven't yet learned to disguise their desires and feelings. They don't yet know they are being marketed to, they want what they want, and they are going to bug their parents to get it. In fact, piggybacking on innocence is a standard tactic in children's marketing, known as accentuating "the nag factor." But they also want to be adults, to help, to be taken seriously.

Capitalism’s grossest win: The final triumph of Black Friday

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:00:00 +0000

For wily veterans of a decade of Black Friday doorbuster sales, 2012 was the year that the last semblance of a boundary between the actual day of Thanksgiving and the formal commencement of the holiday shopping season finally collapsed. It wasn't just the decision by some of the biggest retailers to move their opening hours earlier than ever before. For many customers, the exact time when the doors were unlocked was irrelevant, because Thanksgiving had already become completely subsumed in shopping mania. What difference does it make if the doors open at 8 p.m. or midnight, if you were already in line days earlier?

Consider the example of the Kelley family in Fort Myers, Fla., so determined to sacrifice nothing of their quality of life while in quest for the perfect deal that they showed up in front of the local Best Buy's doors on Monday, equipped with a dinner table.

This is what we call not messing around:

Salon.com > Walmart strike

Is Wal-Mart the enemy?

Capitalism’s grossest win: The final triumph of Black Friday