By Jim Hightower
Here
come Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas. It’s a month-long season of friends
and family, spiritual reflection, and time to decompress from our usual
helter-skelter lives, right?
Good
lord, shout the corporate bosses, are you nuts? Do you think America is some
kind of Norman Rockwell fantasyland? This is the season of mass consumerism,
bucko. So lift your tail-end out of that La-Z-Boy and hit the malls — pronto.
And if
you happen to have a job in a chain store, don’t even think about taking a
holiday — or you won’t have a job the next day. Let us now praise the one God
we all serve: mammon.
Years
ago, Macy’s started “Black Friday” sales as a kickoff to this Holy Month of
Frenzied Commercialization. But it produced such a surge of profit that Walmart
and other chains converted to the Church of Perpetual Selling.
Black
Friday used to begin the morning after Thanksgiving. Last year, reaching for
more, the Elmer Gantrys of Walmart dared to desecrate Thanksgiving itself by
opening their doors to the Black Friday masses at 8 p.m. — on the night of the
Thursday holiday.
This
year, Macy’s, Target, Toys “R” Us, J.C. Penney, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and others
are also pushing the Friday Shop-a-Rama into Thursday. Walmart will open at 6
p.m., intruding even deeper into Thanksgiving’s family dinner hour.
And,
pushing excess to a new high, Kmart will open at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving
morning. Yes, 6 a.m.! Still, a Walmart executive says, “We thought 6 o’clock
was the exact right time to win the weekend.”
Wow —
did you ever think of Thanksgiving as something to “win”? But, then, your
spiritual devotion to mammon probably isn’t as ardent as that executive’s.
Meanwhile,
the same guy reports that the one-million low-wage workers who’ll have to staff
the Thanksgiving profit grab are “really excited to work that day.”
Sure
they are. As long as you think “excited” means furious.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org