NEXT! Or, "Encroachment - Next Thing - Five-yard Penalty, Repeat First Down."

 

'Tis TIME!!
No it's not - get out of the bows! Photo by Joe-elf

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. I hope all four or five of you had a happy, healthy, safe and thankful day. This will be quick, because we're all stuffed and exhausted, and because this post is just a little follow-up to TO ONE I WROTE IN 2012, and its central observation is the same as it was eleven years ago, only more so.

If you didn't bother to click on that link and reread the 2012 post, I can summarize really quickly: we as a short-attention span society are being force-fed the NEXT THING, often before we're even finished with the thing we're doing. Christmas-- sorry, holiday music was playing by mid-November, you say? 

2023 says "Hold my beer..."

July. July 14th - and probably a week old. Photo by Joe

Yeah. If there's a limit to how much the next holiday/event can encroach on the current one, we haven't hit it yet. Halloween candy and décor in stores by mid-July. Christmas candy and décor in stores in August. August!! No wonder our supply chains can't handle a little global pandemic. We may soon start selling next year's Christmas before this year's is over - our holiday hype seasons will have lapped each other!

That's all. The next thing is encroaching closer and closer to today's thing. End of sermon. No point or lesson or anything - not even a punchline. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to put away the Christmas decorations, to make way for next Halloween... What? Next Halloween is over? Fine, I'll put next year's Christmas stuff up, now...

Happy baseball All-Star Break, everyone!

Dear Black Friday

Dear Black Friday,

Oh, how you've grown!  I remember when you were just a baby.  I used to participate - against my will, obviously - in your shenanigans.  I was on the selling end of the deal back then, and you weren't known as Black Friday, yet.  You probably don't remember.  You were still known as "the day after Thanksgiving," and nobody spent the night sleeping in cold shopping center parking lots just to be the first to meet you.

I'm not writing to lecture you, but I do wish you would reconsider using that awful name.  "Black Friday" was our name for you.  Sure, it started with the Philadelphia police, but by the time I was a member of that near-slave-labor retail workforce, it had come to mean "that horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad worst day of the year when we all work from open to close and want to die."  Some like to get all accounting-ish and connect your name with retailers' most profitable month, but either way, it was an insider term!  

It was ours.  It was negative - or at best an accounting term - ick.  It was not for public use, or intended to be the name of anything the masses needed to know about.  I'm not even going to go after the retailers or the ridiculous people who encourage their pushing of your day into the day that precedes it.  Most people know how stupid it all is, but whatever (I just received an email letting me know that Zazzle is extending their Black Friday prices).  We can't help that.  I just want them to call you something else.  

Retail slaves have so little; can't they have their negative insider nickname for you?  At this point, I realize that it's too late.  Black Friday is a thing now, and somehow everyone is on-board with it.  So really I guess I am just writing to whine about that sad fact.  You've been taken from the people who invented you.  I hope you're happy.

I'll see you in December, when the deals are better, anyway.

Love, Joe  

What's The Rush?

The Christmas-- sorry, -holiday- music has begun.  I think the dedicated 24/7 holiday music channels have already been on the air on Sirius/XM for a week.  The "Black Friday" sales ads have been running for at least that long (more on that later this week).  The Salvation Army ringer was outside our neighborhood grocery store by last weekend, as well.  

Are you sensing a theme, here?  Of course you are.  But this isn't a rant against the steady creep of Christmas-- sorry, -the holidays- backwards, up the calendar toward summer.  No, this is a rant about the fact that it's not just Christm-- the holidays.  It seems that we are jumping the gun on almost everything, these days.  We have to get all the holiday songs played, all the sales sold, all the decorations hung, like, RIGHT NOW!!  Why?  Because we need to get it out of the way of New Year's.  

We'll need to put New Year's behind us by no later than December 27th, because we have to make room for the college football championship, the NFL playoffs, American Idol, Martin Luther King Day (or as South Carolina and Arizona still prefer, "Monday") and the Super Bowl.  And those things better get a move on, because all the Valentine's Day cards and candy MUST be sold by January 24th.  Otherwise, there is a risk that those commercials could intermingle with the Presidents' Day sale ads, which would lead to a new recession.  

I know this stuff doesn't sound like a big deal, but it doesn't take much of it to set off a catastrophic chain of of causality.  If Valentine's Day interferes with Presidents' Day, then Presidents' Day will step on spring fashion, Easter (spring holiday) and March Madness, causing space-time to collapse upon itself, snuffing out the universe.  And if back-to-school season isn't over by July 4th -- well, you don't want to know what would happen.

Obviously I could go on, but I won't.  My point is simple:  what is the rush?  I understand that -the holidays- has become so important to our nation's economy that it warrants more than a week or two of attention.  But is FIVE weeks not enough?  And do kids need to interrupt their summer vacations at the halfway point to shop for school supplies?  How long do these things take?  Must everything be compressed forward in time, a little more each year?  Where's the line?  How much time do we need to spend being prematurely hyper-sold in honor of annual events?  

The answer is simple, yet sad.  We need to spend all of our time preparing for the next thing, and the very second that thing arrives, we need to shift our focus to the next next thing, and so on.  We need this.  We need it because we've been trained to need it.  And we shouldn't complain, because this works for us.  It works.  

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a pre-Halloween sale at CVS, and I'd better get in line now, or all the frozen turkeys and Whitman's Samplers will be gone.