Amy Merrick at The New Yorker:
It turns out that a lot of what we’re told about Black Friday is invented by retailers and the marketing experts they hire. Retailers like Black Friday because the earlier customers start their holiday shopping, the more they are likely to spend over all. This year, the competition is heightened because of a relatively short window between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In search of holiday-season profits, retailers work to exploit people’s worries about missing a good deal—and the media, looking for a fun story, joins in. [...]
Though local television news cameras dutifully scan the lines of bundled shoppers waiting in lawn chairs outside their favorite stores, reinforcing the notion that shopping on Black Friday is obligatory, increasing numbers of Americans are opting out. A Nielsen survey published November 18th reported that only thirteen per cent of consumers plan to visit a store this Friday, down from seventeen per cent last year and continuing a four-year slide that has been largely precipitated by the growth of online shopping—which, of course, now has its own marketer-created term, Cyber Monday.
Black Friday doesn’t even necessarily offer the best discounts, contrary to what retailers want their customers to believe. Rather than selling most merchandise at full price and marking down what doesn’t sell, stores now engineer their prices, so that the “discounted” prices are actually at the level they had wanted all along.
David Lazarus at The Los Angeles Times explains how the whole Black Friday-into-Thanksgiving encroachment and making workers work on Thanksgiving is to satisfy the 15% of Americans who choose to shop in stores the day after Thanksgiving:
While there have been plenty of recent stories in the media attesting to the idea that Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year, the reality is that most of us prefer to take the holiday a good deal easier. Nielsen, the market researcher that tends to do a pretty good job of spotting trends, says 85% of consumers won't go anywhere near a mall or a physical store on Black Friday. [...] [W]hile some of those limited stocks of door busters might indeed be priced to move, there's really no such thing anymore as a one-time-only sale.
Thanks to the Internet, every day is Black Friday.
And thanks to the Net, retailers are jostling for people's business pretty much all year round
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
John Briggs at TechCruch:
In the end Black Friday is an exercise in pure commerce. Stores want you to come in because it means they can clear out all their stock in a few short hours. It gives them a cushion for the slow post-holiday season and it makes shopping look like an event. While I'm all for expansion of the commercial spirit, I think Black Friday is such a cynical and scammy experience that it's hardly worth rolling off the couch to partake in. Make some real nerds happy – hit the small guys online, pick up some ThinkGeek stuff or some cool board games or Estes rockets from a smaller hobby shop and let somebody else fight over a $12 Blu-Ray player.
Switching topics,
Paul Krugman looks at how health care cost increases have slowed since the Affordable Care Act was passed:
So, how’s it going? The health exchanges are off to a famously rocky start, but many, though by no means all, of the cost-control measures have already kicked in. Has the curve been bent?
The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic.
And
Timothy Egan's experience shows why, ultimately, the Affordable Healthcare Act will be successful:
I just spent 15 minutes on my local health care exchange and realized that I could save a couple hundred dollars a month on my family’s insurance.
The Republicans don't just want the ACA to fail, they want, well, everything to fail, explains
The New York Times editorial board:
It’s hard to see how Republicans could slow things down more than they already have for the last several years. Yes, they can prevent committees from meeting and add days of wasted time to every nomination and bill. Just after the filibuster vote, in fact, Senate Republicans refused a routine request for unanimous consent to approve several of the president’s uncontested nominees.
But the larger business of governing is already being cast aside. As Politico recently reported, the current Congress has only enacted 49 laws, the fewest since 1947. That’s a mark of pride to Tea Party nihilists, but, for the rest of the country, which expects action on fundamentals like jobs and immigration, it’s a mark of shame.