Every year, crazed American consumers camp outside Best Buys and Walmarts and trample each other in a frenzy to take advantage of big box store’s Black Friday sales. Black Friday is viewed as the start of the holiday shopping season, but the tone they take on is far from festive. People are hurt every year, and sometimes killed, as people storm the doors of large corporate businesses as early as 4am.
This year, Walmart, Sears, Target, Kmart, and Toys R Us are extending this already problematic “holiday” by opening their stores on the newly minted Black Thursday (Fun Fact: Black Thursday is also known as Thanksgiving). This not only means that Americans are being urged to leave their family events to spend money, it means that workers will be forced to do so. This has spurred some Walmart workers to threaten to strike on Thanksgiving as a show of resistance. I mean it’s fucking Thanksgiving after all! It’s as though corporate America is eager to strip away the guise of holiday goodwill that Thanksgiving is supposed to represent, and return instead to the more oppressive “festivities” that characterized the pilgrims and Native Americans actual first encounters.
It’s bad enough that poor consumers are teased like dogs chasing the ever-dangling carrot (or karats) known as the American Dream. But to compromise the few days a year that are explicitly about counting our blessings by way of reminding us of everything we don’t have is plain evil. Black Friday was bad enough, but Black Thursday is insult to injury.
So instead, spend your Thursday with family over good food and conversation. And if upon Friday you want to spend some money, do so locally here in Oakland. Many of the small businesses in downtown and uptown Oakland have unified under the banner Plaid Friday (I’m assuming this is a play on the new entrepreneurial class’s hipster fabric of choice). This indie remix of Black Friday stresses the importance of strengthening our local economy by keeping money in Oakland rather than spending it in soulless retail meccas like Emeryville or wherever the popular malls are (Eastmont anyone?). Of course it also supports the diverse community of small business owners here that help make our city so vibrant.
The City of Oakland is lending a helping hand by granting free street parking all day on Plaid Friday, and every Saturday through the holidays. For more information, watch this great video the young people of award-winning Youth Radio put together, and check out the Plaid Friday website if you want to print out a placard for your local business.
Happy Thanksgiving yall!
