By now, many of you have probably polished off your Thanksgiving feast, and are focusing on a big day of shopping ahead. In fact, our most recent holiday poll estimates that 50 million Americans will be descending on the malls tomorrow.
To most of us, Nov. 28 — Black Friday — is a day to take advantage of blockbuster sales. But there’s another group of folks — I’d call them consumers, but they’d surely take offense — who think all this focus on materialism is bunk, and they’re urging others to live more frugally and buy a whole lot less.
We’re not talking about a small commune of crackpots here, but an array of environmentalists, social activists, and concerned citizens in 65 countries, according to one of the event’s organizers, Kalle Lasn, co-founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, which has promoted Buy Nothing Day since 1992. Adbusters is a not-for-profit magazine, based in British Columbia, Canada, that’s concerned about “the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.”
So for the 17th year in a row, celebrants will mark Black Friday in their usual, unconventional manner, doing things like cutting up credit cards in malls, holding politically charged protests and vigils, and wheeling shopping carts without actually buying anything. Others will mark the occasion less demonstrably, with non-commercial street parties or by just going off on family outings. The idea is to do anything but open your wallet, Lasn says.
Lest you think our friends to the North are ganging up on the U.S., the campaign is also setting its sites on other nations’ conspicuous consumption habits. Buy Nothing Day is scheduled to take place on Saturday throughout the rest of the world.
The goal of Buy Nothing Day, Lasn says, is to encourage people to conserve more of the planet’s resources for future generations, live within their means, and to avoid drowning in debt.
For his activism, Lasn says he’s been heckled and vilified as a Communist hell-bent on destroying America’s economy. Lasn, predictably, sees it differently. “It’s all about making people think and celebrate the holidays in a different and sustainable way. Living within our means will also make us happier and healthier than we’ve been in the past.”
While it’s impossible to guess how many people will participate in Buy Nothing Day, Lasn says the movement has spread like wildfire thanks largely to the Internet. He estimates that tens of millions of people are aware of the day, while 2 to 3 million have actually tried taking a vacation from shopping. A few thousand more, he says, are more actively involved in protests and other demonstrations.
What do you think of Buy Nothing Day? Is it well intentioned noble ideal, Communist conspiracy, or something else? Write to tightwad at cro dot consumer dot org.
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