Loss Leaders and Leading Losers

As Black Friday descends upon the American buyosphere (to borrow from Thomas Hine), it offers an opportunity to consider the civic, cultural, and maybe (though not likely) spiritual obligations in light of consumerism. What follows is a tweak of the Holiday episode of Communication 404: Advertising and Society, and an effort to give shape to a notion of consumer culture that does not neglect its civic responsibilities nor insist on exorcising the structures of liberal capital.

In COMM 404, we read Twitchell’s essay on Santa andCoca-Cola along side Thomas Hine’s chapter on Christmas shopping in I Want That! And the chapter on American Girl Dolls from Trading Up. Triangulating these three texts necessitates considering how the Holiday season develops as a palatable excuse to embed a culture of consumption that both bolsters the economy at a crucial time (December is cold and dark and nobody wants to go walk the storefronts, and also, end of the fiscal year for a lot of businesses) and trains individuals (particularly the kiddos) to engage in the marketplace in discerning ways. The punchline of Hine (and of the Holiday episode of 404) is that if Christmas did not exist (and as the communal and familial event, it did not prior to the late 19^th century) then the market would have to create it (and so it did).

Given this conclusion, Twitchell’s reading about Santa Claus and Coca-Cola as the syncretization of competing or seemingly unrelated logics becomes useful to us, in that much as we see Coke imbricating the holiday with icy cold refreshment (when, baby, it’s cold outside) we also have to see the unpalatable hyper-consumption of Black Friday as part of a broader logic of consumption that is necessary from a macro-economic perspective. Jobs, tax revenue, etc., are markedly improved by the year-end excuse to over-consume.

All this is to say that grousing about consumerism on Black Friday is unpalatable to me. Unpalatable in the first case because of the social training the holiday season performs for consumers. Children (ought to) learn discerning consumer behavior by tailoring lists and by negotiating their expectations relative to social capital (naughty or nice?). All of this productive socializing work can be undone by hyperactive approaches to the market (if we didn’t learn to balance our Holiday approach as children, we might enact a cycle of over-over-indulgence) or done elsewhere by other authorized structures (not celebrating Christmas certainly doesn’t preclude one from becoming a consumer).

I take gripes about an overly commercial Christmas to be unpalatable in the second sense as a historically misinformed and ascetic obverse to the season’s lessons of indulgence. If Christmas is the time when kids can flip the script on their parents and be as willfully desirous as their behavior merits, then it seems Christmas also becomes the one time of the year when people complain about the evils of capital as if it wipes the slate clean on the other 11 months of consumer behavior. More to the point, I’d argue you can chart an increase in the rise of anti-consumer rants about the Holidays directly to a rise in consumption driven economics that span the year. Why step up the consumerism in December if we’re engaging the marketplace full-tilt regardless of the calendar?

But despite my desire to treat the marketplace as useful and socializing institution in contemporary life, there are surely parts of the Holiday marketplace that are unavoidably cynical. While a great sale serves as an instance of community building for Hine, Black Friday will likely indicate a different kind of community: assault by the invisible (and visible) hands of self-interested shoppers. And so we get to the point of the title. We can answer the question “why do we shop now?” at the macro-level as I’ve tried above, or at the micro-level by noting that many shop at unseemly hours of late November because the deals are inviting. These deals, extremely limited but also extremely rewarding, are called “loss leaders” by the retail industry, meaning the shops take losses on those deals in an effort to get shoppers to commit the remainder of their budget to other products in the store.

In this way, loss leaders are a miniature moment of access to a category of product that would otherwise fall beyond the budgets of shoppers, much as early Christmas celebrations (before the mass-consumer iteration) served as moments of reversing the relationship between feudal lords and serfs. In those times, Hine tells us, the landed aristocracy would provide gifts to the workers and servants, providing them access to a class of products that fell beyond their means and station the other 11 months of the year. If we think of loss leaders via the tokenism of class-based gifting, then we can see that loss leaders indicate which way the losers in a given society are being led. And so loss leaders offer us a way of thinking through our relationship to the marketplace that is less about questions of why and when we consume and more about questions of what and where (in terms of locale and status) we consume.

As such, a responsible mechanism of consuming is no longer a function of whether we engage the market in the 12^th month or not (since engaging the market does a great deal of social work and since not engaging the market would therefore have dire social—as well as macroeconomic—consequences). Instead, we can consider or responsibilities to the market alongside our responsibility to leadership, loss, and the broader consequences of purchases. Small Business Saturday (an initiative set up by American Express, which certainly complicates matters) offers a corrective to Black Friday, not so much as an alternative time (I’ll skip Friday and spend my wares Saturday) but as an alternative logic of engaging the marketplace. Seen as that kind of alternative, it might also inform how we engage the marketplace on Black Friday, less a condition of loss leaders and more a condition of taking leadership in how we articulate what constitutes a win and a loss as we participate in the marketplace.