I woke before dawn on the morning after Thanksgiving as the retail megaliths braced for the onslaught from the rabid, foaming, frothing, deliriously consumption-drunk, door-busting, sweat-drenched masses upon which they goad relentlessly at the year's end. I huffed a sigh into the cold, dark bedroom air, sipped from my bedside glass of water and spent what must have been hours tossing and turning, futilely burrowing my way under the covers as if it would lead the way back out of consciousness while replaying in my mind moments from the previous night as a dinner guest.
When the alarm clock eventually erupted in staccato chirping I quickly resigned to another sleep-deprived day and staggered around my apartment, to the refrigerator to swallow a few gulps of high-vitamin mango puree (from Trader Joe's - check it out), to the bathroom to shower away a cowlick, and back to the bedroom to dress for a very casual Friday at work (I was one of four holiday volunteers).
On my way out the door, I ran into a neighbor from down the hall when we boarded an elevator to make our way slowly down all of the floors to the lobby. I often see him waiting in front of the building with his son by the water fountain (shut off for the winter) until a school bus ambles down the lane in the morning. I think I've seen him in scrubs before, too.
"Ya gotta go to work today?" I asked, casually breaking the amicable silence.
"Yeah," he grumbled rather pleasantly between sips from a tall thermos of home-brewed coffee.
"Me too," I grumbled somewhat less pleasantly while thinking of the free and fabulously cheap K-cup coffee awaiting me at work. After being serenaded by the elevator's chime at every passing floor, my neighbor and I parted ways and drove off into the chilly morning as the sun rose. Meanwhile, retail stores across the country had been packed for hours with stampeding, rampaging, rioting hordes (a Wal-Mart employee in Long Island was trampled to death before a single item had been sold).
Some call the day Black Friday, the most anticipated and falsely presumed best retail sale day of the shopping year. Some call the day Buy Nothing Day because the materialistic preoccupation fostered by consumer culture toward the end of the 20th century, spearheaded by profit-crazed big boxes and pinpointed on an otherwise insignificant calendar day, is thoroughly contemptible to those with a remaining shred of dignity in a world gone slobbering mad with boundless consumption for its own sake.
I am of the latter camp, and how did I fare in my goal to buy nothing? I spent $20.23, which to Black Friday zombies could seem like an enviable deal but is blasphemy among Buy Nothing goons.
Here's how it broke down: I bought a bowl of tomato soup for lunch from the curiously packed Potbelly at the Inner Harbor for $4.23. It was as tasty as tomato soup could possibly be, and easily worth about a quarter of the asking price. I've been chasing away sinus congestion, though, and I would have asked for any soup du jour they were offering. The other $16.00 was thrown away for the purpose of stashing my car in a parking garage for nine hours and 28 minutes which, coupled with the same expense last Friday, practically doubled my monthly work commuting costs downtown. Fail.
At least I didn't spend a third-world country's GDP on fleeting a video game system, appliance, houseware, jewelry, pop music, garment, gadget, gag gift, reinvented wheel and whatever other annual fads in a single day. Win.
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