Black Friday is coming up. Is it just me, or has this year's edition reached a new level of cultural impact. It's like in the past, it was just some silly thing that other people do, which you can laugh at from afar. But now it's harder to ignore. All businesses are getting involved, it's starting to overflow into Thanksgiving day itself, and it's becoming the universal start of the Christmas shopping season.
Of course, here in Canada it's just an ordinary Friday. But the effects are starting to overflow here too, since Canadian retailers are forced to have sales to stop people from heading over the boarder for bargains. It's a pity we didn't coordinate things so that we would have our own Black Tuesday on the day after Canadian Thanksgiving. But instead, the sales join afternoon football as a benefit we get to enjoy as a spillover from American Thanksgiving.
And that brings up the weird thing about Black Friday: how arbitrary it is. There's no reason why people should all want to go shopping on the same day, other than the foibles of the calendar giving most Americans a Friday off with nothing to do about a month before Christmas. But that arbitrary swelling of the number of shoppers kicks competition into overdrive, and we reap the benefits of concentrated Capitalism as prices drop.
My point is, there's no reason we couldn't do this any other time of year. If we could all make an agreement that we're all concentrate our shopping on the same day. Say, pick the last Friday in each month; it would be a make-or-break day for retailers, who would have to compete by having big sales. Okay, it would be inconvenient to camp out in front of stores in the early morning and then fight your way into the store every month instead of just once a year. But the point is: low prices.
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