Buy Nothing Day

There's been a movement afoot in recent years to promote the day after Thanksgiving as "Buy Nothing Day", rather than observing it as the busiest shopping day of the year. (In fact, the day before Christmas is the busiest, but the myth of Thanksgiving Day Plus One holding that "honor" persists.)

I agree with the principles behind Buy Nothing Day - our society is way too obsessed with material goods, and insatiable consumerism has become our cultural ideology - but I participate in it for more mundane and pragmatic reasons: I hate shopping. You don't need to ask me to stay away from the stores.

However, this year, I disregarded my own good sense. I went to a discount retailer on Friday morning. I recently got a new job, so for the first time in over 6 years I can afford to spend money on some new gear. But not a lot of money, so I've started watching store adverts for sale-priced items. Well, one of the discount electronics chains had a 14" LCD monitor for $99 after a couple of rebates worth $150 combined. The monitor that I use on a switchbox for my web server, my firewall, and my in-case-of-emergency Windows machine, is an ancient 12-inch-viewable black-and-white CRT that maxes out at 800x600. A sharp, colorful, bigger replacement for $99 would be a worthwhile purchase. They also had a small UPS (with my flaky power, I could use another) for only $5 after rebate. And I had to get up early anyways on Friday morning to deliver the newspaper (the job I'm quitting).

So after finishing deliveries, I drove out to the store in the commercial district on the edge of the city and went inside. I knew going in that they might be out of them, so I was prepared to leave empty-handed. The store (rather sensibly) had people get in line to pick up items like monitors, computers, and other sale items, to avoid fights over who saw it first and so on. Then after a floor staffer got you the item you wanted, you'd stand in line again to pay for it. While I was in line to get the monitor and UPS, I saw an doofus in the check-out line with a shopping cart loaded with 4 or 5 of the monitors and a few of the UPSes. Based on his position in line, he must have gotten there an hour before I did. Of course I had to wait in line for half an hour to find out that this asshole had in fact taken the last of them. I got the last UPS.

When I got the bad news, I just scowled, thanked the nice boy in the blue shirt for checking to see if he could get one ordered from the warehouse (he couldn't), told him he could save the UPS for someone else (I didn't want to wait in line another hour just to buy that), and walked out. On the way home I wished I'd thought to go back to introduce myself to the cunt with the several monitors in his cart, saying, "Hi, I'm one of the people you're screwing over by taking all of these for yourself. Have a nice holiday... but I hope you die and go to hell first, because if there is a benevolent God, he must hate people like you."

What kind of person does that? Gets up extra early on a day off from work, jockeys with heavy traffic into and out of the mall district, stands in line for an hour or two, so he can make sure that he gets the bargain-priced merchandise instead of someone else? Not anyone I want to encounter again. And certainly not anyone I want to be.

I can reassure myself that I was already up, and fully dressed with my coat on, and that I really still need to save money. But I still came too close for comfort to being one of those people. So I have learned my lesson, and I promise myself now that I will never again go to a sale on the day after Thanksgiving. It'll be Buy Nothing Day for me, from now on.