We’re always hearing about the war on Christmas — but for the past few years, Christmas has been waging war on us.
Stores haven’t been content in merely encouraging a Black Friday shopping crush. Instead, they started opening on Thanksgiving Day itself — and then started doing it earlier and earlier in the afternoon.
To their credit, most shoppers haven’t fallen for this trick — and more stores are realizing that family and friends have won out over mindless spending.
It used to be that you would eat on Thursday and shop on Friday (or work on Friday). So what happened? The 2008 financial crisis and economic meltdown happened — and the American spender went on strike.
In 2008 and 2009, consumer spending actually fell — for the first time since 1980. And this time around, the drop was a lot steeper.
Though Americans’ spending has gone up since 2009, it hasn’t recovered all that much. Between 2000 and 2007, consumer spending rose by 22.9 percent after inflation. Between 2007 and last year, it’s risen only 8.3 percent.
Retailers, then, became desperate around the financial crisis — and so they tried to make their customers desperate by inciting a panic: If you don’t shop on our national holiday, you won’t be able to afford presents for your kids.
Walmart started offering its Black Friday deals on Thursday at 8 p.m., and then Thursday at 6 p.m., and other stores competing for the same customers had no choice but to follow.
Seven years later, the exhausting fact is: It hasn’t worked.
Last year, Thanksgiving weekend sales dropped by double digits.
It’s important to remember here: This is good news. People aren’t as stupid as retailers think they are. They saw the artificially created stampedes for a piece of plastic that their kids will have broken or forgotten about in a few weeks anyway — and they said no.
Plus, retailers’ fake-emergency marketing has worked against them. People can see that stuff is already on sale — and that it will be on sale next week, the week after and, of course, after Christmas. There is no rush.
People are also smarter than their own government. For the past seven years, Washington has kept interest rates at record lows in the hopes that people would go out and borrow and spend again. They haven’t.
People knew, in 2007 and 2008, that they had taken on way too much debt.
Since then, they’ve been trying to fix that — and in doing so, have been helping us strengthen our economy. Americans’ household debt peaked in 2007, at about $16.2 trillion in today’s dollars. Today, it’s barely above $14 trillion.
People who owe less money for imported trinkets are stronger.
The government hasn’t gotten this message yet. But the stores have.
In the past couple years, Americans have mounted “Boycott Black Thursday” movements on social media, shaming stores that stay open. Last year, one of the biggest such sites garnered 100,000 Facebook likes, and savvy store executives have absorbed the message.
This year, Staples, which was open last Thanksgiving, is closing. Sporting-goods shop REI will stay closed on Thanksgiving just like last year, and will close, too, on Black Friday, to give workers an extra day home.
And stores staying open, like Walmart, aren’t trying to make headlines by saying they’ll open an hour earlier this year, as they have in the past.
It seems to have occurred to them that they need wealthier customers — and wealthier people find that forcing low-paid people to work on a holiday is distasteful.
Prediction: As stores increasingly realize that trying to force their poorest customers to snatch goods from each other’s hands isn’t great for their images, you’ll see more stores closed next year — and making sure that everyone knows about it.
(And no, workers aren’t losing money. Customers will find time to do their shopping another day.)
So, this Thursday, if you’re not a police officer, a firefighter, a neonatal nurse or someone who really has to work, enjoy your turkey and stay home.
That’s what most people are doing.
And yes, when you do go out shopping on Friday or whenever, remember which stores forced their workers to be away from their friends and family on the one holiday that pretty much all Americans celebrate. Informed choice is how free markets work.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.