Thanksgiving Need Not Be a Celebration of Consumerism

Just two more days until we “celebrate” the most repressive, exploitive, selfish holiday of the year. Yes, I’m talking about Thanksgiving. What was intended to be a commemoration of our national heritage and good fortune to reside in the country most people in the world aspire to live in has turned into a day of consumerism, a day when the retail industry chooses sales over family, when shoppers display crass, even criminal, behavior to snag trinkets and big ticket items before other desperate souls can get their grubby hands on the goods.

My antipathy toward the commercialization of Thanksgiving is long-standing. I railed against holiday store hours while publishing a retail industry magazine. I reasoned it was an anti-family imposition on retail workers and infused meanness and frenzy to shopping that consumers really need not endure. 

Perhaps you saw the article in The New York Times 10 days ago, “Spending Thanksgiving, Retail Stores Are Facing Off Over Closing or Opening On the Holiday” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/business/some-retailers-are-promoting-their-decision-to-remain-closed-on-thanksgiving.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C{%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22}&_r=0). Apparently, more retailers are coming around to my way of thinking. But the curve is a long one.

Consider the comments from Dan Evans, a spokesman for Nordstrom, a company that stays closed on Thanksgiving. He told The Times, “If our customers really wanted us to open on Thanksgiving, that’s what we’ll do. We used to be closed on the Fourth of July. We used to be closed on New Year’s Day, but customers wanted us to be open on those days, so now we’re open on those days. Our customers guide us. We don’t guide them.”

That last sentence says a lot about leadership in this country and our collective mores. Instead of setting a values standard, corporate America is willing to cede responsibility to a vocal group that, like the Queen song, screams, “I want it now, I want it all.” And I don’t give a damn how it inconveniences your workers. 

At the end of the day, is it really worth fighting over a few doorbusters at the expense of your dignity and the ability of mostly underpaid retail workers to spend quality time with their families? 

Enjoy your turkey. 

I'm Really Sick This Time

My wife and friends all think I'm a hypochondriac so there's no additional shame in telling you I feel lousy. I'm sick. No temperature, but I've got a hacking cough, sore throat and a stuffed nose. I've felt this way for about six days now, which means about another four to seven days of misery. I don't even get the benefit of staying home from work since I don't have an every day job anymore.

Tuesday morning around 5:30 I finally succumbed to my hypochondria and looked up strep throat on WebMD.com. I lacked the symptoms. I checked out how to treat a plain sore throat. It advised to take pain killers to relieve the discomfort of swallowing. It worked, so I’ve continued medicating, have gargled with salt water and imbibed cups of tea laced with honey. 

Finley’s not aware of it, but I’m blaming him for this health setback. Come to think of it, Dagny had a running nose when they were here for Passover. Hmmm ... I rarely get sick. I’m more prone to complaining about body aches (which are real, trust me, but are mainly due to my disinterest in exercising, stretching, limbering up). Well, I guess this is a counterpoint to the joys of grandparenthood. 

Colbert Joins the Attack: Move over, Mel Brooks. Stephen Colbert has joined the ranks of those who make fun of my given name.

During Monday night’s Colbert Report, the comedian was riffing on the liberal initiatives of Pope Francis, specifically his washing the feet of two women as part of last Thursday’s pre-Easter celebration. Colbert even went so far as to state, “There were no women in the Gospels. It’s a common mistranslation. Jesus was actually born of the Virgin Murray.”

Then he showed a picture of a cloaked man, which, to be honest, didn’t really look like me but did bear a striking resemblance to Gilda’s brother Carl. 

Five Finger Discounts: Did you see the article in today’s NY Times about retailers using databases to screen out job seekers who might have been involved in stealing from a previous employer? (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/business/retailers-use-databases-to-track-worker-thefts.html?hpw&_r=0)

It’s no secret employee theft is a bigger problem than five-finger discounts perpetrated by customers. So controlling internal theft is a big issue for retailers. 

The Times article dealt with prospective employees. For those already on the payroll, Kmart had a different tactic to thwart theft. I’m not sure if Kmart is still doing this, but years ago its store managers used to monitor the level of purchases made by their store staff. They reasoned that employees could not find merchandise such as paper products or toiletries for less than what they would pay at Kmart. So if someone wasn’t buying such goods at work, they probably were secreting the stuff out the back door. Closer observation of the suspects ensued. 

Brooklyn On My Mind: Next Friday, the movie 42 will premiere. It’s a biopic of Jackie Robinson. From the clips I’ve seen it looks like a winner.

I can’t remember actually seeing Jackie play in person for the Brooklyn Dodgers but I’m sure I did. Growing up in Brooklyn, we had a sweet access to Ebbets Field. If you sent in a quarter plus 10 wrappers from a Borden’s Ice Cream bar, you’d get a general admission ticket for a seat along the left field foul line. I wasn’t a Dodgers fan, but my brother Bernie was, so he took me along to games. 

Bernie has fond memories of visiting Ebbets Field, sitting in box seats behind first base with our mother, courtesy of tickets provided by one of our father’s sales representatives, Mr. Schaenman, who had an office in the Empire State Building. I can remember going to his office, riding the ear-popping elevators up to the sky to his office to pick up tickets for games, to Yankee Stadium for me, to Ebbets Field for Bernie, until they moved to Los Angeles, that is. After that Bernie would take me to Yankee games, though he didn’t become a fan. We’d always have box seats at Yankee Stadium, low enough that after the game we’d be close to the field and able to walk out on the outfield grass to the massive exit doors in center field (it was a different time back in the 1950s and early 1960s.) 

Anyway, Bernie remembers a game at Ebbets Field when he arrived early to watch batting practice. Though he tried to get a baseball hit into the stands, he couldn’t. At the end of batting practice a policeman suggested he go after a ball headed for the seats, but he got there too late. The ball dribbled back down onto the field. However, Billy Loes, a Dodger pitcher, retrieved it and handed it to Bernie. I don’t remember us ever having a baseball, but I must have been less than seven years old when Loes played in Brooklyn, and I never played catch with a real baseball. Too dangerous. You miss catching a baseball and it could knock your front teeth out. That’s what happened to a friend one year at summer camp where they specifically told us not to play with a baseball. Too dangerous. They were right. 

Bernie says he lost the ball a year or two later while playing on the street, probably down a storm sewer. Sewers were a real hazard when playing in the street or even on the sidewalk in Brooklyn. We’d lose at least one ball each time we played, until our arms were long enough to fish the sphere out of the sewer. No, we didn’t actually reach the bottom of the pit with our fingers. We’d elongate a wire clothes hanger, fashion one end into a loop, then go fishing for the ball down the sewer. Most times we’d reel in our lost balls, though they were usually Spaldeens or Pensie Pinkies—lightweight pink bouncers. Baseballs, being far more dense, were difficult to raise up. In case you suspect I’m making up this sewer fishing, here’s a corroborating post from another blogger: http://stillabrooklynkid.blogspot.com/2011/08/games-we-played-spaldeens-and-sewers.html. 

An Arresting Experience

I almost got arrested inside a retail store, hardly proper behavior for an editor and publisher of a retail industry magazine. This was nearly 28 winters ago when I ventured out one snowy February to purchase a Toro snow shovel from a home center chain now defunct but whose name I will not abuse again.

I say “again” because I exacted revenge for a less than optimal shopping experience. I recounted the deficiencies of the retailer and its store manager, by their respective names, in an editorial column in my magazine the following month. Shortly, I will relate details of the incident, but I bring this matter to your attention today because of an Op-Ed piece in The NY Times the day before Christmas and a Letter to the Editor in response that appeared this morning. 

Like many of you who read Delia Ephron’s commentary, I identified with her hellish online shopping experience (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/the-hell-of-online-shopping.html?_r=0). Yours and mine might not have come at the hands of overburdened and doubtless underappreciated J. Crew order fulfillment workers, but we’ve probably all been disappointed when the online purchase we made failed to deliver the desired result, whether it be because of late arrival, improper packaging, wrong product, a missing or incorrect note, or some other blunder. Given the volume of non-store retailing these days—nearly $100 billion—mistakes are bound to happen. It’s human nature to want to get even, but when you have a bully pulpit, as Ephron had via The Times, and I had in Chain Store Age, you possess retaliatory power that may be disproportionate to the offense incurred.

That was a central point of the response from Millard Drexler, chairman and CEO of J. Crew. His first sentence said it all—”I was more than surprised that a customer complaint was elevated to an indictment of online retailing on your Op-Ed page” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/opinion/rating-the-online-shopping-experience.html). 

I am not against citing retailers, by name, if their strategic practices warrant criticism. But public exposure must be commensurate with the crime. Specificity is desired in journalism, yet singling out one retailer for misdeeds common to the industry is a little too heavy-handed, especially when they are not germane to the overall viability of that retailer. 

Now, on to details of my near-arrest but nevertheless arresting experience. I arrived at the home center at 12:30 pm on a Saturday. I quickly found the Toro snow shovel, got in line and waited my turn. And waited my turn. And waited my turn. By 1:20, my patience had been exhausted. For some reason the store manager had scheduled half of his cashiers for their lunch break at the same hour, during prime shopping time. Lines at the open registers were 10 deep, and growing. From his perch in the office near the front of the store the manager looked on without shifting into overdrive. Customers were getting militant. They were demanding action. Open more registers, they cried. I was caught up in the revolt. 

The store must have expected such behavior because it employed a burly security guard, an off-duty patrolman from the town, which too shall go nameless lest I find myself once more face-to-face with a officer of the law from that community. The policeman-cum-security guard confronted me. He asked if I had a problem. I said I did. He inched closer. He repeated his question. I quickly realized several things. First, he was much bigger than I. Second, he was a policeman and could easily arrest me on any number of pretenses (that town was notorious for its aggressive policing). Third, the 20% discount on the snow shovel wasn’t worth an arrest. Fourth, it was a short walk to the Caldor in the same shopping center where I could buy the same product, albeit at full price. Fifth, actually, there was no fifth. By that number I had determined the wiser course of action was to hand the snow shovel to the guard and walk out of the store. 

In case you’re wondering, the retailer exacted a printed apology from me two issues later for overstepping my “editorial privilege” for extrapolating one incident into a chain-wide defect. I never went back to that store or chain. Several years later the company went out of business, partly because Home Depot had arrived in its trading area, partly because the lack of service throughout its store network failed to provide a reason customers would remain loyal to it. I gleefully noted its demise. But not in print. 

(By the way, as long as I'm admitting to being less than perfect, I have been advised by my wife I would not make a good scientist. Seems my disdain Wednesday for research into the effect air conditioning might have on lowering the death rate during times of excessive heat was ill-placed. Gilda says it is quite useful to study what might seem to be common sense as it could be discovered just the opposite effect transpires. In the case at hand, it might have shown people better tolerated extreme heat before the widespread placement of air conditioning in homes, offices and public buildings. Mea culpa.)  

Season of Giving and Taking

In this season of giving, news reports remind us it also is the season of taking, as in “Shoplifting tab to hit $1.84B,” according to the Associated Press.

The AP story said in the “four weeks leading up to this Christmas, an estimated $1.84 billion in merchandise will be shoplifted from retailers in the U.S., according to The Global Retail Theft Barometer. That’s up about 6% from $1.7 billion during the same period last year.”

No doubt about it, “five-finger discounts” are trending up, what with an economy that hawks purchasing at too many people unemployed or too underemployed to afford all the goodies they and their families want.

The dirty little secret of retail losses from what the industry calls “shrink,” however, is that insiders—retail employees—steal more than customers. It’s been that way for years. Employee theft accounts for about 44% of all losses, compared to 36% from shoplifting. The rest, the AP reported, results from vendor theft and administrative error.

Some years ago I heard about Kmart’s efforts to control insider losses. Management would review each employee’s monthly store purchases. If they fell below a certain percentage of take home pay, red flags would be raised. After all, why would an employee not buy household and health and beauty aid supplies, stationery and other commodity purchases at Kmart, where they’d get an employee discount? One possible explanation would be the employee was simply taking home the goods without paying for them. An investigation would follow.

The story, perhaps, was apocryphal. But I always thought it had a ring of authenticity to it.


Choose Your Obscenity: Which to you is more obscene, the throngs of mostly young men who grappled last week to get their grubby hands on $180 a pair Nike Air Jordans, or the $88 million reportedly paid by the 22-year-old daughter of a Russian billionaire for a 6,774-square-foot penthouse apartment at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan?

Perhaps neither affronts you. By my very question you can surmise I find both disdainful. Push come to shove, as happened across the country with the Air Jordans, I’d have to say I am more repulsed by the real estate transaction (I also wasn’t too excited by another deal at the same address, a mere $24 million for a three-bedroom apartment.)

I’m not against the free market setting prices. But let’s be real, people. The apartment doesn’t come with Central Park thrown in, just a view. I’m not sure if the apartment comes furnished, but even if did and everything inside it was trimmed in gold, $88 million is a little much. I’ve seen castles and mansions, all with extensive grounds, that would sell for less.

As Gilda pointed out, one has to wonder from where the money to afford these purchases came. The Russian father is an oligarch of questionable morality and business dealings. While rank and file Russians struggle, oligarchs and their minions have brazenly usurped wealth, natural resources and power.

The Manhattan real estate market has been pumped up by financial industry bogeymen, er, I mean, moneymen. Naw, I mean bogeymen. Rarely do they contribute anything tangible to human endeavor. Their sole purpose is to make money through arcane, manipulative practices few understand, fewer regulate. Their mistakes plunged the nation and world economies into turmoil. Millions lost jobs, retirement savings, homes. With rare exception, only they and their gilded lifestyles have rebounded. They’ve made it almost impossible for ordinary people to invest without anxiety as their computer-generated trading systems produce huge stock market fluctuations, not just daily but also hour to hour.

It’s hardly a wonder, therefore, when the common folk fight for a pair of sneakers. It’s the most tantalizing asset many of them will ever own. Which is an obscene commentary on our society.