This entry is scheduled to be published on November 24th, 2023. The day after Thanksgiving in the United States, known as “Black Friday.” An absolute Hell-On-Earth for retail workers as the holiday shopping season which, let’s face it, starts as soon as Halloween ends “officially” gets underway in what amounts to an orgy of consumerism as people fight, sometimes literally, for great deals on random shit that, for the most part, no one really wants or needs, and certainly not for the stress the whole event brings about.
Indeed, the entire “holiday season” as it’s known is, quite simply, the absolute worst time of the year. It can’t be understated just how stressful this time is for the retail industry: The floods of people who just seem angry for no good reason; who, for some reason, have gone through 30, 40, 50+ years of life and never grasped the idea that stores may just be out of things; that lines are going to be long; that stores are going to be understaffed; anything, really. As if this is the first time this insanity has ever happened… shit that takes up a quarter of the year for no reason!
We all know the “holiday season” is really Christmas, with the initial inclusion of New Years, but then other holidays got wrapped up. At the core though, it’s just Christmas — a pagan holiday converted into a holiday celebrating a myth which, since it happened to involve gifts, became an annual tradition that eventually, through commercialization, took over a goddamned quarter of the year! You have no idea how much I truly feel it should be outright outlawed.
Hear me out — if “black friday” gets its name from struggling retailers getting “back in the black” due to holiday sales, why not just stretch all of that selling out over the whole year? How about we place more value on individuals birthdays, which are at least reasonably spread throughout the year, instead of the entire western world going nuts at once. If people are going to spend the same money, why not, right?
Oh sure, you would say people wouldn’t spend money, that they don’t through the years, yadda yadda.. yeah, because they all know the holiday season is coming and they plan around that. Eliminate the very concept and what happens? Same money, spent at different times.
No, I’m not stupid, I know good and damn well without some kind of North Korea like authoritarian hell taking over the nation that won’t happen, but it’s a thought experiment. Just, consider how much less stressful everyone’s lives would be, and how much more value it would bring to any given person’s birthday for what would be their share of “holiday” spending to be put into that special day unique to them?
Think about how much more balanced the retail industry would be — where all quarters would be, hopefully, good, instead of businesses relying each year on 4th quarter to really keep them alive. It just makes sense to spread it all out, in my mind, but what do I know, I’m just a retail professional who happens to also be a blogger. It’s not like I don’t live it every year in one way or another.
Consider the phenomena of seasonal depression. It tends to be blamed solely on the days being shorter and while, sure, that does have an effect on people, consider that it also seems to subside by January, even though actual Winter is JUST getting started then and the days are only just starting to lengthen after the winter solstice: that’s not going to have nearly as much of an effect as something else that happens around that time — the holidays fucking end, and for many people the stress is finally over. The bullshit is done for another year, and many of us can relax. Yeah, there are more holidays that have their own stressful moments in the year (we have too many goddamned holidays as is if you ask me) but nothing like the all encompassing hell that is the “Holiday Season.”
What am I getting at? That I think the whole thing is fucked up, and because of tradition there’s not a goddamned thing that will ever be done about it. It’s incredibly damaging to a very critical part of the workforce and no one really cares. The people don’t matter, the epic sales events where little Jr. Son-of-a-bitch can get his oh-so-precious GameCast 9000 that’s just going to wind up in a Goodwill donation bin in 6 years is all that matters. So what if the stocker working 12 hour days putting stuff on the shelves, being asked constantly “do you work here” by people who can’t read a damn sign to find anything slowly, day by day, loses any excitement they once had for Christmas? What does it matter that the sales associate is having to hear the same 12 Christmas songs day in, day out, so much that he builds a permanent tick of having an anxiety attack whenever he hears them in a movie or on TV, because his brain has forever associated those songs to being yelled at for items not being available? So what if the poor cashier who just wanted a seasonal job for a bit of extra money goes home crying because every other person they checked out screamed at them for a “pricing error” that not only do they have no control over but wasn’t even an error to begin with — the damn customer just can’t read a fucking sign correctly.
It’s all needless. Yeah, you can say “well you took the job, expect it” but that’s such an entitled cop out you should be ashamed. No one asks to be treated like this. The retail work force tries hard to do things they best they can when things are stacked way against them. The least people could do is have some humanity and understanding but no, when the best deals of the year are to be had, all you can do is turn into animals; savage, heartless monsters with no empathy for the feelings of the human being trying to help you: providing a service that you, in that moment, don’t just want but feel you need.
Yeah, have a holly jolly fuck this. It is, truly, the worst time of the year.
More to come, as always.