Sense and Sensibility

Black Friday’s Grotesque Reverie

Gird yourself for the discount gauntlet.

Never mind the Recession and double-digit unemployment, Americans will not forgo rapacious foraging on Black Friday, even under pain of death.

And death came early for the markdown mavens last year. A hapless WalMart clerk, Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death last year in Valley Stream, N.Y., by craven consumers ready to devour the Deal of the Day. If we were the reverent souls we profess to be, we might observe a moment of respectful silence for Damour, whose mortifying death reveals a tad too much about our orgiastic consumer society.

According to evolutionary psychologists, it’s the belief that exorbitant items affect the way people treat us. The auction was as raucous as –well a WalMart on Black Friday. What, one might ask, is the difference between Bernie Madoff’s Jaeger-LeCoultre watches and the $300 laptops for which retail rustlers will sacrifice a body part?

But in a pallid economy overly dependent on retail, it’s “Katie bar the door.”

Retailers are reportedly mollifying their gladiatorial approach to Black Friday, which has become the suburban consumer’s retail equivalent of Paintball. No more will shoppers be whipped up into a lethal frenzy like pit bulls in a South Georgia basement. No more will they seethe at the gates, camped out like odiferous rock fans on cold cement. WalMart’s solution to the gate-swarming potential of its pre-dawn opening is not to close at all.The New York Times reports that the retail giant will be open all Thanksgiving day, a gift for which all of us should be grateful. If you have no one and nothing about whom or which to be grateful, it’s always heartwarming to spend the holiday in the automotive cleaning supply aisle.

The news that shopping might be a kinder, gentler experience came just after Bernard Madoff’s epic tag sale. The U.S. Marshall’s office organized an auction of Madoff’s personal booty, which raised $900,000 for the victims of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. Among Madoff spoils: the Monoblocco, an 18-karat Rolex valued between $75,000 and $87,000; Ruth Madoff’s Victorian diamond earrings, which sold for $70,000; five fur coats and three polo shirts monogrammed with “Bull,” the name of one of his yachts. 

In “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior,” Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico argues that we buy high-ticket items to lure high-end friends and mates, and get better treatment than the rest of the barbarians at the gate. As he told Time magazine, “animals achieve much of their survival and reproductive success through self-advertisement, self-marketing and self-promotion.”

Image – in other words —is everything. It gets you a better seat at the opera and better treatment at Le Cirque.

That’s why people who don’t know any better generally believe a $10 bottle of wine is exquisite if it comes with a $100 price tag. It’s why Madoff bought Rolex instead of Timex in spite of the fact that both watches tell time.

 It may be that our voracious bargain hunting is a product of a provident society intent on getting the most bang for its buck.

Or it may be that scooping up a brand name at discount gives us the illusion of pedigree at half the price.

But if the Christmas spirit is really with us we may realize that profligacy breeds penance more commonly than it does good cheer.

This year, we may actually have a chance to try out the outlandish proposition that Christmas is about more than booty.  Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com