What Does The FL Think of So-called Black Friday?

[dh66]

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[vitanola]

Do the boys in marketing look like Don Draper?

No. Like this:


and like this:

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Boys have many faces. Take the cynicism of P. T. Barnum, the cold-blooded dishonesty of Claud Hopkins, the evangelical smarminess of Bruce Barton, the oily manipulativeness of Edward Bernays, the glib tongue of Father Coughlin, the shamelessness of George Washington Hill, and the conscience of Joseph Goebbels and you'll find the combination of DNA that boiled together in the early 1950s to emerge as Modern Scientific Marketing.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Modern Scientific Marketing.

Practically everything has become a "science" these days.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Well, I survived the day, in spite of my dread. Even though I work in a retail establishment, we thankfully don't have any of those bogus "Doorbuster" gimmicks that other places use to fuel the insanity. I drove by several places though that I'm sure were suffering from the onslaught of greed of this black day.
On my way to my bank and post office I passed Michael's, Walmart, Best Buys, Toys R Us, Costco, and a host of lesser retail entities all nestled together in their plazas. The parking lots were all completely full, some with lines of traffic waiting to turn in from both directions! :eeek: Only to search in vain for a parking place.
So I have this to be truly thankful for this Thanksgiving, that I could blithely sidestep it all and emerge unscathed.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Practically everything has become a "science" these days.

I am grateful that Lizzie suggested that I read Vance Packard. "The Hidden Persuaders" makes this science very clear. I think everyone should read it.

 

[Feraud]

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Exactly. Brain washing of the masses at its best.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I am grateful that Lizzie suggested that I read Vance Packard. "The Hidden Persuaders" makes this science very clear. I think everyone should read it.

Glad you found it useful. I strongly recommend Packard's other books as well, especially "The Waste Makers," which examines shoddy engineering and planned obsolescence in consumer goods, and "The Status Seekers," which examines how The Boys use Americans' insecurities about social class as key elements in selling them "upscale" products that are, in reality, no different from ordinary goods.

Together, these three books show you exactly how we got from where we were as a society in 1945 to where we are today. The methods The Boys use today may be more sophisticated than they were in Packard's time, but the essential philosophy behind them -- that the great mass of consumers are not only easy to manipulate, but that deep down *they really want to be manipulated* -- remains the same. This is true whether The Boys are selling goods -- or ideas.

Think about a fish snapping at a baited hook. Does anyone really believe the fisherman doesn't have anything to do with it? Packard shows you just how the fisherman chooses and trolls his bait to ensure the fish *will* bite. Because the fisherman knows the fish better than the fish knows himself.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Lizzie I bought The Status Seekers and The People Shapers which are next in line. I'll add The Waste Makers. Thanks.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I don't care if they were giving big screen TVs away, I'm not camping out for five days to get one. As Ron White cracked, "I wouldn't camp out for five day if I was....camping."

 

[Foxer55]

I see a lot of energy here being put into blaming someone else for any problems made by catering to The Boys In Marketing. They are only gods if someone makes them into gods. Remember, your job is to keep your money, however, their job is to get your money. The victim class out there thinks they got screwed but if you ain't smart enough to play the game, you lose.

 

[cchgn]

Read through all the pages, I have a different perspective.

When I was a young Marine and didn't have a care in the world, I heard about Black Friday, but it meant nothing to me.

Later when I got a family of 3 kids, it meant the world to me. I's a Dad who wanted to make sure and get everything my kids wanted. I wasn't making much back then, but I made sure my family didn't want for anything. Black Friday was a Godsend. I literally saved 50-70%, every year and back then, I needed every single %. The thought of anyone begrudging me for those things would get an earfull.


Retailers say that this season is the biggest sales time of the year and wish there could more times like this.

Economists say that consumerism is the guage of economic health. We've been in a depression, there's only two things that bring us out- war or consumerism. Pick your poison.


At this time of year, we can choose to see things in a cynical light or a positive one. IMO, the whole point is the latter.

Happy Holidays,,,,,

 

[Gregg Axley]

IMHO what's fueled some of this "savage" behavior over sales, is the door buster item.
5 or 10 of a certain item, for 60-70% off encourages camping out, pushing/shoving, and fist fights.
At least in my town they do.
But long ago when you just had sales, it wasn't this way.
At least I don't remember this happening, and my parents never mentioned it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We haven't been in a depression. Not even close. In the winter of 1932, nationwide unemployment topped 25 percent, banks were failing in every state and charities were reduced to feeding hungry people from pails of restaurant garbage. We haven't approached that level of crash since, due largely to protections put into place during the 1930s -- at least not yet.

But I do believe a depression -- a real one -- is inevitable as the ultimate result of an unsustainable consumption-driven society. The population simply isn't going to be able to keep up with the increasing need to feed the maw -- we've seen that already in the constant pressure for consumers to spend, spend, spend, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, discard, discard, discard, replace, replace replace -- regardless of whether you *need* the goods or not. The job assigned The Boys is to ensure that you think you need the goods, because it's the only way to keep the engine chugging. I don't disagree with you when you say that's how the system works, because that's how they've set it up. My point is *that system can't be sustained forever, and we need to be thinking beyond it.* Vance Packard made this point in 1957, and less than sixty years later -- a mere blip in the overall human timeline -- things are moving in just the direction he predicted. What we saw in 2008 was a spasm symptomatic of a deeper disease.

Eventually the engine will run out of fuel -- and we, the people, are the fuel that it's going to run out of. We've created a society based increasingly on the creation and distribution of things of no intrinsic value whatever -- you can't build a house with an iPhone app, you can't eat social media, you can't clothe yourself in mortgage notes. When the society that created these things crashes, they will lose all the value that society assigns them. And then, then, there'll be a depression, and it'll make the one in 1932 look like a little whistle storm. And the only people who will survive it will be the people who've already learned the difference between what they actually need and what The Boys have convinced them that they want.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Read through all the pages, I have a different perspective.

When I was a young Marine and didn't have a care in the world, I heard about Black Friday, but it meant nothing to me.

Later when I got a family of 3 kids, it meant the world to me. I's a Dad who wanted to make sure and get everything my kids wanted. I wasn't making much back then, but I made sure my family didn't want for anything. Black Friday was a Godsend. I literally saved 50-70%, every year and back then, I needed every single %. The thought of anyone begrudging me for those things would get an earfull.


Retailers say that this season is the biggest sales time of the year and wish there could more times like this.

Economists say that consumerism is the guage of economic health. We've been in a depression, there's only two things that bring us out- war or consumerism. Pick your poison.


At this time of year, we can choose to see things in a cynical light or a positive one. IMO, the whole point is the latter.

Happy Holidays,,,,,

I don't own or want a big screen TV. However I was able to buy (online) clothing I normally can't afford because it was 40% off for Black Friday. No complaints here. My husband was also in the USMC and when he first got out we had very little in the way of money or things. We went to a big box store on a Black Friday to get him a computer that we couldn't otherwise afford at the time.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

Doesn't this all boil down to what values we're teaching our children? I was raised in the 60s and 70s when values were starting to change from teaching children personal responsibility to what finally became the "it's all about me and I'm a victim" mentality of the 80s onward. My grandparents were raising their children during the Great Depression and my parents lived through it, so other than my parents having a mortgage, everything was paid for with cash. If you didn't have the money in hand to buy something, you either did without it or you saved up for it. My parents never had a charge card until the late 70s and even then if they used it - which was rare - it was paid off when the bill came. Today, I have just one credit card and it's used to buy just about everything because we get cash back at the end of the year. But, every week I go through our bill online and deduct everything we charged from our checkbook register just as if it was a realtime purchase - which it is. Then at the end of the month when the bill comes, the money is already deducted and I pay the bill in full. And we make money off of what we purchased - usually about $200 or $300, not much but we're spending the money anyway, so we might as well make a little money off it. You just have to be careful what you buy. LizzieMaine is right, it's about distinguishing needs from wants or things some marketing company is trying to convince you is an absolute necessity. Dh and I have still have our "dumb" cell phones we've had for 5 or 6 years rather than paying out an additional $80 a month for Smartphones. We're not narcissistic enough to be posting or texting our every move in life so our old phones meet our needs. If it wasn't for a family member who has serious health issues, we probably wouldn't even have cell phones. IMHO, schools should be teaching little Liam and Emma (2013's most popular baby names) real life skills like learning how to handle money, make and LIVE on a budget, and be personally responsible for their own decisions in life rather than making sure their little egos are overinflated to the point they believe the world revolves around them and the world owes them everything.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

And now you have people willing to literally kill for a deal.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The most important lesson I was taught growing up is that your life is not the sum total of your posessions, and in fact has nothing to do with them. My grandparents lived in one house for almost their entire married life -- they didn't buy a "starter house" and then "flip" it for a bigger one and so on ad infinitum. They didn't live in an "upscale suburb," they lived on a simple working-class street surrounded by other working-class houses containing other working-class families who were their friends. Nobody cared about having the next big thing, nobody competed with each other. When they died, their house contained the same appliances, and most of the same furniture that was in it when they moved in. A lot of that furniture is in *my* house today.

That was the way *they* were raised. There were no political overtones to it, they weren't trying to make a statement about "responsibility" or "victim mentalities" or anything like that, and in fact they thanked God every night for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the WPA, which got them thru a winter where there was no other work to be found. What they *were* doing was living a simple, subsistence life because *that's what most people did then.* The Boys From Marketing were busy with the upper middle class at that point, not yet having discovered that they could get even more blood out of the working class by dangling illusions of class-advancement in front of their noses like a carrot on a stick. So nobody was trying to overburden them with useless junk they didn't need. If they were hungry, they'd dig a peck of clams off the shore and pull up some dandelion greens out of the dooryard, and that was supper -- they didn't mope because they couldn't afford Fine Dining, because it never occured to them that Fine Dining existed or that there was any reason why they should aspire to it. They drove a rusty old Chevrolet for twenty years because it got them where they needed to go, it never occured to them them that they'd present a better image in a shiny new Buick. If they wanted new clothes, my grandmother got out the sewing machine -- an antique even then -- and made them. There was no such thing in their world as "designer cachet." What's the point of paying good money for a dress just because there's some Frenchman's name on the label?

*That* is the kind of "Golden Era" society we need to get back to -- not a "poor" society, but a society where people are satisfied with what they have: family, a few close friends, a meal on the table and clothes on their back. Because when the crash happens, that's the only kind of society that's going to matter.

 

[Virginia Creeper]

Do the boys in marketing look like Don Draper?

If they did, I might feel more charitable towards them.

 

[Stanley Doble]

We haven't been in a depression. Not even close. In the winter of 1932, nationwide unemployment topped 25 percent, banks were failing in every state and charities were reduced to feeding hungry people from pails of restaurant garbage. We haven't approached that level of crash since, due largely to protections put into place during the 1930s -- at least not yet.

But I do believe a depression -- a real one -- is inevitable as the ultimate result of an unsustainable consumption-driven society. The population simply isn't going to be able to keep up with the increasing need to feed the maw -- we've seen that already in the constant pressure for consumers to spend, spend, spend, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, discard, discard, discard, replace, replace replace -- regardless of whether you *need* the goods or not. The job assigned The Boys is to ensure that you think you need the goods, because it's the only way to keep the engine chugging. I don't disagree with you when you say that's how the system works, because that's how they've set it up. My point is *that system can't be sustained forever, and we need to be thinking beyond it.* Vance Packard made this point in 1957, and less than sixty years later -- a mere blip in the overall human timeline -- things are moving in just the direction he predicted. What we saw in 2008 was a spasm symptomatic of a deeper disease.

Eventually the engine will run out of fuel -- and we, the people, are the fuel that it's going to run out of. We've created a society based increasingly on the creation and distribution of things of no intrinsic value whatever -- you can't build a house with an iPhone app, you can't eat social media, you can't clothe yourself in mortgage notes. When the society that created these things crashes, they will lose all the value that society assigns them. And then, then, there'll be a depression, and it'll make the one in 1932 look like a little whistle storm. And the only people who will survive it will be the people who've already learned the difference between what they actually need and what The Boys have convinced them that they want.

The ship has been sinking for 40 years, ever since they started sending the jobs overseas and America's working class became Taiwan, Japan, and now China.

Steerage is under water, the working class is about done for and the middle class is treading water, hard.

The only thing that has kept up a semblance of prosperity since Reagan, is borrowed money. Private debt, public debt, all at unprecedented levels. Boom after boom fed by money printing and new ways of lending money.

Where it all ends I do not know. One thing I do know is, if interest rates ever rise to 5% or 6% which used to be normal, average rates everyone is dead including the federal government. In the meantime how they manage to keep inflation under control is a mystery.