"What kind of meaning will this holiday season really have on us? As we succumb to our outlandish spending impulses, how do we overcome?
Ah, America — land of the free and home to the mantra of “buy more, buy bigger, charge my credit card and we’ll forget about it until creditors are knocking on my front door.”
With the holiday shopping season looming around the corner, I’ve been wondering what is in store for an economy so contingent upon the crux of super sales while a solid portion of our country’s white picket fences are being repossessed.
Generally, most Americans buy into the hype that is known as Black Friday across the board; however, considering the current crisis, it seems that even the most anticipated shopping day of the year can’t assuage the fears that our semantics may be significantly altered, as black takes on a whole new meaning.
It seems so much more likely that the significance of Black Friday may fall short as its expectations lower to a far more deplorable Black Monday. The dismal economic outlook isn’t looking much better with the encroaching season. Consumers are predicted to spend an average $200 less this year, and for those who have been really smarting from the recent fiscal fallout, ‘tis the season to be more of a penny-pinching grinch than a plastic cash wielding maniac running through Best Buy at five in the morning.
Of course, this is inevitable; we are in the midst of a crippling economic disaster, and so far, nobody has any viable solutions on how to fix it other than government buy outs of failing financial institutions who overshot their greed and exploited America’s very precarious barely middle class until it was nothing more than a colossal pile of futile loans left to rot in a really putrid trash can.
Also, let's not forget the ill-fated auto industry that has, for decades, fettered around with expensive gas guzzling behemoths instead of heeding consumers’ calls for more practical, affordable cars. Detroit’s crash was a long time coming, and the audacity of the industry to feel deserving of some ill-conceived blank check is disconcerting and desperate and does nothing to change an obviously bad course.
Our country is sitting around, scratching its head, wondering what to do as consumer confidence (duh) falters and stocks fall lower by the second in a nightmare of a downward spiral with no end in sight.
So what kind of meaning will this holiday season really have for us? As we succumb to our outlandish spending impulses, how do we overcome?
There is a new president on the horizon, with a new horde of economic specialists coming into office to sit there and scratch their heads.
There’s Timothy Geithner, the incoming treasury secretary, who has been working around the clock to find a solution to stabilize the ailing Citigroup, and Laurence H. Summers, former chief economist to the World Bank and the once and future head to the White House Economic Council. Obama isn’t taking his appointment tasks lightly, but will it be enough machismo and know-how to avert another worldwide depression?
I can’t really say. There is a lot of obscurity in what is to come, but I know as a tuition-paying college student, I won’t be the only one cutting corners this holiday season.
Consumerism is the heart of our nation, and our knack to spend is the bloodline that feeds our stability. As capitalism has taught us, money makes our world go round, but there is an ugly side to the “buy, buy, buy!” paradigm upon which we are based. How ironic that it is that we can only spend less during the one time we really need to spend more.
Walking on eggshells is really uncomfortable, especially when it’s because that often spoken-of money tree really was a fallacy to being with.
Alana can be reached by e-mail at alana.arbuthnot@asu.edu.
