The old shopper's rally: "Shop until you drop" was heard throughout the realm this weekend. CNN reported initial results for this year's Black Friday--more shoppers, modest sales. They led the article with a photo from a Coach handbag factory outlet, showing the small showroom packed with shoppers eager for handbags that come with an opening MSRP in the $250 to $500 range and sell for nice discounts. I can attest to the accuracy of that report, as I visited a similar Coach outlet store and was one of the bedraggled shoppers who squeezed from counter to counter and stood in what seemed an endless zig-zagging line to check out with the goods. I was just one of many similar men in the store absorbing the lesson that the women there, who outnumbered us about 3 to one, really, really, really liked these high end brand-named purses from China.
Oddly, just a few places ahead of me in the line, there were two Chinese men, obviously tourists, clutching five bags apiece! I passed a moment of quiet amusement to think that here was a product made in a factory in China and shipped 5000 miles to the US at some expense, and there were two tourists from China who flew to the US at even greater expense to buy the bags here and take them right back home to friends and relatives for gifts. Ah, what a wonder the modern branding and marketing machine is to produce these behaviors in the masses! My companion on the trip, a Chinese woman herself, explained that the handbags are not marketed and sold in China, but nonetheless are highly desired.
When I finally reached the end of the checkout line, ready to buy my gift, a friendly Coach salesgirl was offering tootsie rolls from a big leftover Halloween bag to restore the sugar burned in the effort to get this far. Remember Halloween? That was the big holiday we were were celebrating just a few weeks ago. Now we have finally launched the holiday shopping season in earnest. Black Friday has come and gone, and businesses around the nation have their fingers crossed in the hope that people will finally start spending money that they can really ill afford to spend in the midst of this near depression. A few moments later they were literally barring the door to the Coach outlet store, and a long line was forming outside the store again as they let shoppers in in twos and threes. I guess I was one of the lucky ones who got to just walk right in without a long wait.
Later, moving to the next group of outlet stores across the street, I stared at the jammed parking lot and decided it would be easier to simply drop my companion off in front of the store and then circle the lot, with about 30 other cars searching for spaces, while she shopped. I forsook the effort to find parking and just quietly listened to the radio, watching other drivers cutting each other off and honking in anger when someone maneuvered to steal the spot where they had been waiting for another shopper to leave. In the midst of it all, noting the seemingly endless rows of Toyotas and SUVs, it occurred to me that it would take years of severe adversity to beat this model down--designed and built by corporations and so long entrenched in our society. The advertising, the holiday setup, the shopping, were now the real cylinders that moved the engine of our social order along. You just go to your job each day, if you still have one, so you can afford to do this.
So now it's on to Cyber Monday, then the hectic "last ten days" of Christmas shopping, then New Year's and we start the merchandising cycle over again for 2011. Never mind the millions who have already dropped, with one in six on food stamps, a raft of foreclosures still in the housing fraud pipeline, and a real unemployment rate near 20 percent in this country. That's what happened to the other guy. The only question you have to answer is this: have you dropped yet?
JS
