The big day is upon us, the Black Friday meme is in full force, doorbuster deals are pitched to begin as early as 4am. Everyone wants to catch the early worm shopper, and NMT is no exception. We call your “growing excitement” and raise you one BUY NOTHING DAY. Consume nothing, except comestibles, go nowhere except by self-locomotion, and reclaim your pre-industrialized sustainable nature.

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If this year’s “Black Friday” fails to pull retailers out of their red ink, should the dubious protologism retire its presumption to speak for consumer confidence? I think it should. Wasn’t it really just an economist’s “for the Gipper” meme –putting the solvency of the market on the shoulders of Christmas shoppers, rallying them to pull the economy into the black, regardless if it meant spending themselves into the red? I hate it when emotion-charged phrases are usurped by pretenders. Hiroshima was “Ground Zero” before the WTC, the “Homeland” was Nazi Germany, and “Black Friday” was Robinson Crusoe’s, well, Man Friday.

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“BLACK FRIDAY” BREAKING NEWS- What do you make of the trampling of a Wal-mart worker by crazed bargain hunters at Long Island super center first thing on the day after Thanksgiving? Crazy shoppers, or beguilingly crazy bargains? Which most aroused your curiosity? Savage crowd behavior, that’s nothing new. But maniacal consumer behavior in the mist of a darkening economic crisis –that’s PR whitewash.

Did you know that the first shopping day after Thanksgiving was known as “Black Friday?” Neither did I!
 
Apparently “Black Friday” is so named because it’s the first day of the year that retailers can recoup enough from their sales to put their balance sheets into the black. As opposed to “in the red” which is bookkeeping jargon for running at a loss, which is what retailers do for the rest of the year, apparently.
 
Boy did this sound like malarkey.

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