Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

Author:Douglas Rushkoff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781591844761
Publisher: Current Hardcover
Published: 2013-03-21T06:00:00+00:00

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Black Friday gets worse every year. The infamous day-after-Thanksgiving sale-a-thon, when stores launch the Christmas shopping season by offering their deepest discounts of the year, seems to get more extreme, more urgent, and more violent each time it comes around. The stakes are high, and not just for the consumers who trample one another—sometimes to death—in order to get through Walmart’s doors the second they open. Equally invested are many market analysts and economists, who now treat Black Friday’s results as reliable indicators of the nation’s financial health.

Fully aware that the Black Friday sales figures will lead the headlines and have a significant impact on the following Monday’s stock indexes, investors look to what’s happening the day before Black Friday for a hint of how to be positioned for the actual Black Friday, which is really just a way to be positioned for whatever happens on Christmas. Knowing they are being judged in advance and eager to get a jump on their competitors, retailers edge toward increasingly earlier opening times. While the earliest Black Friday sales used to begin Friday morning at 9 a.m., by the early 2000s they had moved up to 6 a.m. or even 5 a.m. Customers lined up in the cold outside their favorite big-box stores on Thursday night, and local news shows showed up to cover the spectacle.

By 2011 some of the most aggressive stores, such as Target, Best Buy, and Macy’s, decided that they would push the envelope even further and start Black Friday at midnight. Walmart rolled Black Friday all the way back to Thursday evening at 10 p.m. Shoppers showed up, but now they were complaining. Some were upset that they were being required to leave their families during Thanksgiving dinner in order to get a good place on line. Others felt the expanded hours just lengthened the shopping day beyond their endurance levels. Some even seemed aware of their complicity in overworking store clerks, and of how the fun of Black Friday had turned into more work for everyone.

Employees complained, too, and those at some of the big-box stores were fired for refusing to come in for the overnight Thanksgiving shift. Memories of late-nineteenth-century union fights over workers’ hours were retrieved by the press: “Even though it’s a desperate time doesn’t mean that we should trade all that ground that our fathers and our grandfathers, everyone that came before us, fought really hard for,” a Target worker told the New York Times.18 JCPenney, in a nod to these sentiments, kept their opening time at a respectable 4 a.m., because “we wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their families.”19

The extreme overwind has pushed many shoppers and workers over the edge, and even threatened the Christmas shopping season as a whole. What was once a seasonal consumer sport now feels to many like work and an intrusion on the rest of the holiday. Having found a temporal anchor in the limbo of generic, big-box shopping, retailers couldn’t help but spring-load it until it just broke.

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