At the Towson Town Center the other day, it’s the usual bumper-car madness. You drive into the big shopping center garage and look for a place to park. There must be a spot somewhere. You circle and circle, one level to the next, and the minutes drag by. Time starts to lose all meaning. November drifts into December. Babies are born; nations go to war. You glance in your rearview mirror. You notice you look six months older than when you arrived.
We knew it would happen. But we went to the malls anyway, didn’t we?
We went not only because it was Black Friday, or Thanksgiving weekend, or the official start of the Season of Gift Buying and Gluttony. We went because it was our patriotic duty. The people trying to pull the country out of this scary recession told us so, didn’t they?
Just as they told us to go shopping after the attacks of Sept. 11 — if we stick to “normalcy,” maybe we can bluff our way past the rough spots and convince ourselves that life goes on as it always has.
If we shop, we kick-start the moribund economy. We go to economic war with our shrunken wallets wide open. If we spend money, it means solvency for stores and jobs for employees, and then it means orders of new goods, and more production, and jobs for people doing the producing.
If we don’t shop, it’s implied, then we’ve sorta let the country down.
At the Towson Town Center, the anecdotal news seemed pretty good by Monday. When you finally cut in front of that old lady with the slow reflexes and grabbed the last parking space in the garage, the salespeople in the mall sounded hopeful. They were talking about Black Friday, the day stores hope to move into the financial black after months of slack sales. They said it was quite heavy.
Plus, nobody got trampled.
At one Towson Town ladies apparel shop, a saleswoman said shopping through the entire weekend was heavy. But she was standing next to several racks of 50 percent-off outfits. Those, she said, were the big draws. Salespeople at several more stores in the mall said sales held up well the whole weekend.
But, after a pretty strong Black Friday, the weekend numbers didn’t hold up around the rest of the country. Slackers, all of ’em. Not doing their patriotic bit. Shoppers were grabbing the budget items and the buy-one-get-one-free items, but they weren’t spending the kind of money retailers had anticipated.
By Monday, the stock market responded to this news by dropping 679 points. All but one of the 35 members of the Morgan Stanley index of retail stocks were down for the day. And the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research made it official: We’re in a recession.
As if this is some kind of bulletin.
Here’s the problem with shopping our way out of it: We are a nation deep in debt. Not only deep in collective debt, but individual debt. Our credit cards are maxed. We’re not paying our bills on time. There are now billboards out there in middle-class suburbia declaring, “Call us if your home’s about to be foreclosed.”
A lot of homes are getting foreclosed, and cars repossessed, because we didn’t know how or when to stop doing the very thing we’re now being told to do all over again: Spend.
It’s what we’ve learned to do as a society. We shop because we have needs, sure. But we also shop because it’s a diversion, it’s a hobby, it’s a kind of sporting event to look for the best bargains. We shop because we want to look successful, we want to keep up with our neighbors.
We shop, some of us, because the goods we buy are the way we define ourselves: We shop, therefore we are. We are what we consume.
Look, I have a big-screen TV! It’s a sign to ourselves that we must be successful.
Look, I have a new car! Hey neighbor, get a load of this!
So now we’re being asked to shop as a way of attaching jumper cables to the economy. But isn’t that what got us into so much trouble in the first place — we buy goods we don’t need with money we don’t have.
Look, nobody’s saying don’t shop. The holidays are coming, and we all want to express our feelings for loved ones.
But doesn’t it feel as if we’re getting mixed messages here? We’re swimming in debt because we overspent in the first place. And now we’re tracking the holiday sales as if big numbers would be a sign of economic salvation, and not a reminder of how so many of our problems started.
