Sustainability Events: The Day After Thanksgiving (Whatever You Wanna Call It)

Ah, the day after Thanksgiving. A day when everyone is too fat to do much of anything...except go shopping at the big mega-mall. Or at your local boutiques. Or don't go shopping at all. That's what this post is about.

The day after Thanksgiving has become known as "Black Friday" for major retailers. It's probably the one day that stores look forward to the most, because they know that the first unofficial shopping day of the Christmas season will sit the tone for the rest of the season and put many retailers "in the black" for the year. As such, they tend to pull out all the stops to make it as profitable a day as possible. You've seen the pictures and news stories about how stores open at some ungodly hour to let in the people who have been lining up since an even earlier ungodly hour to get in and take advantage of ginormous deals. Just in case you haven't, here's a news story and a picture for you:

Inevitably, you hear a story about the craziness that occurs in the mad rush for savings. This year was no different. There was a story about a woman who used pepper spray on her fellow shoppers to make sure she got the product she was looking for. (But that's okay, because pepper spray is basically just a food product anyway.) It seems like the whole scene gets nuttier every year.

At the other end of the spectrum is "Buy Nothing Day". This grew out of a reaction against the excess seen on Black Friday. The point, as the name implies, is to buy nothing on a day when everyone else seems to be in a shopping frenzy. It's a day to step back and evaluate our consumerist culture and how it's destroying our society. This year it took on particular urgency, given the Occupy movement spreading throughout the country. The point was made that at the same time that protesters were getting kicked out of public spaces, people were allowed to camp out all night in front of stores just to be the first in line at 4 a.m. when the stores opened with their huge sales. The Buy Nothing movement seems to be getting more popular these days. I know a lot of people who participated just because they didn't want to get caught up in the frenzy.

[INTERJECTION: It's interesting to note that my roommate and I just had an exchange about a series of commercials advertising Christmas deals on cars that we saw while watching the Predators-Canucks game. Apparently neither of us has either given or received an automobile for Christmas because we neither love anyone enough or have someone who loves us enough to give cars as holiday gifts. How unfortunate for us when everyone else seems to be giving their loved ones new Lexus' for Christmas.]

But what if you want to do a little bit of shopping but don't want to deal with the huge crowds? What if you want to find something small and meaningful for the people in your life that you care about? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...Plaid Day. This is a movement I had not heard of until this year. It's a recognition of the fact that there are people who are going to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving, but the idea is to drive as much of that traffic as possible to local businesses instead of huge mall stores. Local businesses participate, although many of them do so through advertising and not by offering deep discounts. As such, my guess is that they gain business from people who already are interested in shopping locally and might want to make an extra statement on the day after Thanksgiving. I don't know if there are numbers quantifying the amount of people shopping at Plaid Friday stores instead of mall stores, or comparisons of how much money they spent, but these would be interesting to see.

Anyway, for one of my sustainability events, I decided to take advantage of Plaid Friday to go out and do some shopping. Now, I'll be honest. I mainly went out looking to buy for one person: me. I'm old-fashioned and still like to buy my music on CD rather than downloading it. However, I hadn't bought any new music for quite a while, so one of the places I ended up was Landlocked Music, where they had this display in the front window:

Between Landlocked and a later stop at TD's, I ended up with discs by Neko Case, the Decemberists, and local band Murder by Death (who will be at the Bishop Friday if you read this in time). Good haul, if you ask me. Other than buying music, I mostly did some window shopping and browsing, looking for ideas for my mom and my sister. But I got a chance to observe stores and other people shopping. There didn't appear to be huge crowds out there, but I could tell that there were a number of people who don't normally go shopping on a Friday afternoon out and getting a jump on their holiday sprees at local stores. On top of that, all of the local restaurants on the square and on Kirkwood seemed to be full, which is also good to see. All in all, it seemed like a good day for local proprietors, who took advantage of Bloomington's strong buy-local community to support their neighborhood businesses instead of the big-box stores.

Here's to more days of local shopping ahead....