Holidays and Values (and I Don't Mean Bargains, I Mean Value Systems)

I read an article on AC by Trudi Buck that really got me thinking about the retail season versus the holiday season. She had written about the Walmart tragedy in New York, people stampeding for big screen TVs at a discount store. To me it is one of those emblematic episodes. It isn't a snapshot in time - a bunch of people standing out in the cold for hours, too little sleep, too little money, too little concern for themselves and their fellow man not to trample to death a hapless employee at the door.

It's not just that you don't see a lot of retail stampedes is good times, it's that even in hard times the last thing we should be doing is pushing each other down and running ahead to purchase a luxury item we could live without. You never hear about people being trampled to death in the soup line at the Salvation Army, or to get a ladel full of mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving day at the shelter. When the helicopter hovers or the truck slows down with bags of rice and water to strife torn areas or areas ravaged by famine, sometimes you do see all those outstretched hands, maybe people willing to climb over someone else to get something they desperately need to survive, that their children need. More often, honestly, people hold out their buckets or bags and hope for the best and the reality is the military or the government or some privateer has already taken half of the supply shipment and diverted it elsewhere where there is not such need, and these folks will walk away with what they get and hope to survive.

America in recent memory hasn't been a country of extremes of wealth and poverty - or we haven't been exposed so readily to those extremes because of the middle class blocking the light. Not so much now. Rows and rows of empty houses, foreclosure auctions held weekly. Going out of Business signs. Some people are indeed starving, and many have been starving for quite some time. Some people are indeed homeless, and many more will soon be marginally housed. There is an undercurrent of desperation as we watch our home values sink, our 401ks wither, and as we wonder even though we pay our mortgages on time, if perhaps in the next lowering of the hammer it might be our jobs cut, our home now vulnerable. Wehave a strange way of reacting to that unease though.

The middle class in America is feeling the pinch. People who graduated from college twenty to thirty years ago are watchingh their own children grow up and not get college degrees. Some mortgaged their homes to pay for their children's education and now have to live lean lives because that gravy train has jumped the track. More and more adult children live at home longer, some remaining unemployed for long periods of time and even more remaining marginally or under-employed. The dying factory towns on the late 1970s and the 1980s are nothing compared to the entire states swooning over banking, mortgage, high tech and now automobile failures. We'are at a place where we should be shoring up, adapting to new circumstances.

We aren't in a place where helicopters are going to have to go into certain neighborhoods blocked off by street gangs or isolated by derelict infrastructure to bring in food and supplies - but I think we are beginning to realize that the way we have lived our lives, the policies we have supported and the environment of entitlement we have created could lead us there.

Which brings me back to Walmart. Two thousand people standing outside in the cold, lured by low prices and time sensitive deals. The biggest ticket item - hugely discounted big screen TVs. Think this scenario through on both the retailer and the consumer side. It is the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving began in this country over altruistic and humanistic realizations - settlers survived a very hard year, not on their own and not through pluck - but because there were already people here who knew how to live off the land and who helped them. Before the exploitation and violence happened - there was a sense of having pulled each other through. Over the immediate hurdles of a hard winter, long summer - finally the harvest came in, and it was plentiful. The only thing to do was to hold a feast, in part to dull the memory of famine and in part to celebrate a renewed sense of capability to survive, to thrive. 'Family' gathered at the table included both white settlers and native Americans. It was a tableau of what could be.

So, 2008, day after Thanksgiving. Country has been pummeled by bad news. Jobs are scarce, homes are being lost to foreclosure, others spiraling down in value, banks are failing (but being bailed out), the cornerstone auto company in the country has also now gotten in line for its bailout just as other major employers announce bankruptcy restructuring from which they hope to eventually emerge or final liquidation sales when restructuring could not be effected. Everything in the wind signals a time to hunker down and conserve, spend less, use less, downsize before we get too big to sustain ourselves. But, most Americans still have money in their pockets. They have families to feed. They have cars that run or public transportation to get them from point A to point B. They are told it's going to be a harsh year if Black Friday foretells low sales. Rewind in your mind to financial news reports during Thanksgiving week - 'retailers pin hopes on robust Black Friday'. And, as any fool knows, in a downturn you want to stretch your retail dollar so you head for the lower end stores where you imagine your money will go farther. (Frankly, it's better for the economy if you shop locally and especially partonize small and mid-sized businesses, but I digress). You don't want to have to buy each of your kids just one gift. You want to look like you're able to weather this and things are going to be okay. And, oddly, you don't want someone less worthy getting a better deal than you.

Now the retailer. Finger in the wind, he knows you're coming his way in all likelihood, but he also knows you're going to be choosy. You don't HAVE to buy from him. You can go anywhere you want. He can read a spreadsheet and he knows he NEEDs you to buy stuff in his store. He knows his level of mark up, his bottom line on profit. He's got a family to feed too, more or less. So, he entices you. He doesn't advertise warm clothing at 25% off, or a free oil change with $100 purchase - because thatmakes you think things are bad, could get worse. He wants you to buy the things people won't be buying two months or six months from now. He needs to liquidate his high end inventory before it begins to grow cobwebs and before his next payment on a shipment of goods is due. He polishes off his shiny items and convinces you that with the coming change to digital you need a plasma or an LCD TV. You need it NOW. You need it at the very best price - and he is going to offer that price, first come first-served, on Black Friday. Win win.

That is the set up. It is the set up we should all be reflecting back on ourselves. Is this who we are and what we are in these times? Is this who we are and what we want to be for the future? Are we people who will trample other people to death to get a big screen TV we not only could live without, but probably can't really afford right now? Are we companies willing to make a buck at ANY cost?

Well. America, yes, that is who we are. Our stores are chock full of shiny items in the windows. Our car lots are full of European and luxury automobiles. And while we may not have trampled them to death, unless we live in very rural areas, we pass by people who are starving, homeless, falling from the middle class into the abyss, every day. We have convinced ourselves they are lazy, mentally ill, substance abusers. Some of them are. Some of them are not only just like you and me, they are better than us. They lack our venality, our condescension, our self-righteousness. They can't afford to possess those qualities any more. They are just trying to survive.

We are all really just trying to survive. We aren't that far removed from those settlers and those native Americans forging a bond of survival together. Though this is a land of plenty as it was then - it is also a land of challenges. Those challenges are more of our own making now - economic, techological, ideological, but they are just as daunting as frozen land unyielding to a garden tool, or swift-footed prey better acclimated to the topography.

Unlike our predecessors at that first Thanksgiving, we want to get to the table long before anyone else arrives, and strip it clean. We want stores in our own cellars, just in case. We want to put a fence around those animals and charge you to come slaughter one instead of allowing them to run free to be hunted according to each person's ability to hunt. We also don't want to take our booty back to the village to share, but we want to place it in our outpost.

You and I are those people lined up outside Walmart two weeks ago. We are the Walmart executives and store managers who designed the sales and decided how to get more people in the door quickly to tally up sales before anyone else could so stock prices would rise on predictions of a good holiday season. We are the buyers and the sellers and we always have been.

If we are uncomfortable with this image, then we should do something about it. I am not without luxuries and comforts in my life. In the most immediate sense, I can afford to shop for the holidays. I have savings in the bank and money coming in the door. I have children with gift lists, though God love them, each has cut back significantly in what they asked for because they realized all on their own that they have not only everything they need, but virtually everything they want. They know there will be no 3G phone (my apologies to Verizon and AT&T) because we don't need a 3g phone to make calls or even to send texts and we don't have to have something just because it's there. They know there will be no Wii (again, my apologies) because we have two existing game systems and we don't really have time to play games so much as we used to anyway as school is more challenging as the kids get older - and I just have to be so much more productive both at work and home to make things work. I know there will be no weekend at the spa. I swim every day, I work out and I have a hot tub in my back yard. I can close my eyes and it is the same as being in Calistoga. And I apologize to the automakers, but there will be no new car for quite some time. Our old cars are running just fine and they are pretty fuel efficient. We should use them until we wear them out.

We are not a society that uses things until we wear them out. Remember when we used to buy VHS tapes? Then it was just DVDs, and now we're being convinced we have to go BluRay. Technological advancement is fine - but it isn't always necessary amd we shouldn't be forced into commerce by taking away the old and replacing it only with the new. To all those people lined up at Walmart the message should be, buy a big screen TV if you really want one and can afford one, but don't buy one because someone is dangling it in front of you (before the prices plunge again anyway) for two hours on one day. For the love of God and humanity, don't trample someone to death in pursuit of some item you won't use for very long and that will be forgotten soon enough.

Where are our values as a society, as human beings, that such things happen here? We allow ourselves to panic, to behave like a herd or a mob. Just because they put out the ad and don't fully stock the store and line you up like animals in a stockyard doesn't mean you have to behave like them. And retailers - customers, employees - are human beings. Nothing you have to sell, nothing you want to find on your quarterly report, is worth making anyone's life worse - let alone taking a life.

Should we be spending money this holiday season? Well, sure, if we need to - if we want to share love in the form of items. That's not a bad thing at all. But it wasn't so long ago that you found underwear and warm sweaters and your good winter outfit under the tree - not new laptops to replace the laptop we bought last year and new cell phones that don't do anything that different than our old cell phones. During Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, solstice - retail shopping season - whatever you celebrate - remember the reason our country is in such a financial mess and so many of us are is because we make possessions for the sake of making money (as much as we can as quickly as we can) and we buy posessions for the sake of owning them. Our entire country has been turned into one big candy shop and for generations now we've all had our faces pressed up against it, salivating almost as much as the storekeeper on the other side.

I've been out shopping with my kids. When we go to Target we find a family that appears to be struggling or to not have a lot of money. One of my children will walk up to this randomly chosen family and hand over $40 and then walk away into the crowd. We've done this at the grocery store too, and each time I buy our groceries, grateful that we can afford what we need, we also buy one of those bags marked for the Food Bank. Rather than spending $2,500 on gifts for our extended family, we are spending half of that. We are doubling the amount we normally charitably give - shopping for a Salvation Army family, doling out a little cash here and there - using local merchants. For us the holidays are about a precious gift to all of humanity. We're trying not to lose that focus. We understand the part we've played in falling from that idealistic perch of the first Thanksgiving, or even of simpler Christmases past, and we want to get back to those basics of not taking more than we need, sharing what we have and being a part of a family and a community.

I'm not better than people who will stampede over other people, not realizing they are killing someone. I'm not better than a shopkeeper who lures people in with promised bargains that really benefit me more than the consumer. But, I'm trying to be, and I'm hoping as a society we might all try to be again. Because we need to change to just to survive, and if we choose to change and do it well, we wil actually thrive..