Holiday Notes: Shopping, Woody Allen, Huckabee

Were you one of the 247 million Americans who trudged down to the mall over the 4-day Thanksgiving holiday to celebrate our collective good fortune by spending a record $59.1 billion? I wasn’t. Not that I don’t have lots to be thankful for, but I make it a point to abstain from the in-store frenzy. I didn’t even participate in the $1.5 billion Cyber Monday buy-fest. 

Perhaps because for 32 years I had to report on this ultra-patriotic shopping activity I developed a certain disdain for Black Friday, followed by Saturday and Sunday at the shopping center. Coverage of consumers fighting over Xboxes or big screen TVs or Ugg boots was all too predictable. Also predictable was the supposition that strong Thanksgiving weekend sales presaged an overall strong holiday shopping season. Yes, that could happen. But what usually transpired was a lull in spending that picked up only in the last 10 days before Christmas. Meanwhile, newspapers and electronic media wondered who would win the game of chicken between retailers who did not want to reduce prices and hurt their profit margins and consumers who wanted to wait until extreme discounts opened up their tight hold on their wallets. I’ll be very surprised if such stories don’t start appearing in about a week.

Too Awed to Ask: I’m a little behind in my reading, so I finally looked at a NY Times conversation with Robert De Niro printed November 18 in the magazine section. Written by the film critic A.O. Scott, the article highlighted a challenge many journalists confront when interviewing a famous person. Scott wrote, “I confess, however, that it took all my professional discipline to resist squandering the time I spent with De Niro on a recent Saturday afternoon in a slack-jawed fanboy recitation of his greatest hits. Oh, my God, you’re Jake Lamotta! You’re Johnny Boy! Your Travis Bickle! I’m talking to you.”

That paragraph reminded me of my year at Syracuse University earning a master’s degree in newspaper journalism. One of my classmates and best friends, Steve Kreinberg, got a freelance gig as a movie critic on the Syracuse New Times, an alternative lifestyle newspaper launched just two years earlier in 1969 (and still around today). After we laughed our way through Woody Allen’s Bananas in a suburban Syracuse movie theater—there is nothing that makes you feel more Jewish, and alone in the world, than guffawing at Woody Allen shtick when the rest of the audience is sitting cold, stone silent—Steve announced in the parking lot that he landed an interview with Allen the following week in New York City. Though Allen was in the middle of editing Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask, he agreed to meet Steve at his studio.

He drove down to Manhattan. When Steve returned he was uncharacteristically quiet. When the next edition did not run his interview I demanded an explanation. Sheepishly he admitted he lost all professional composure in the presence of the great man. He just kept gushing, “You’re Woody Allen. I love your work.” There’s only so many times he could say that before Woody determined this interview was going nowhere. 

Steve eventually recovered his moxie and went on to become one of the five question writers for the old Hollywood Squares show (the one that featured Paul Lynde in the center square). He was expected to write 50 acceptable questions per day, and yes, celebrities were counseled before each show on topics they would be asked. After Hollywood Squares Steve and his writing partner Andy became staff writers for Archie Bunker’s Place (Carroll O’Connor’s successor show to All in the Family) as well as for Herman’s Head, Saved by the Bell, Head of the Class, Nine to Five and Mork & Mindy. 

Funny, He Doesn’t Look Jewish: I’m always amused when out of left field a famous person has it revealed that deep in their past a Jewish gene lurks. Think former secretary of state Madeleine Albright (though how an intelligent woman like she could not figure out her parents chose to flee Prague in 1938 because of their Jewish origins is beyond my ken). 

Anyway, I was reading this week’s NY Times magazine when I came across this response from Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, also-ran 2008 Republican presidential primary candidate, Southern Baptist minister and Fox News Channel talk show host. Asked how to celebrate the holidays, Huckabee said, “On Christmas Eve, we go to the service at our church, and when it’s over, we go out for Chinese food.” 

Funny, I didn’t know Huckabee was Jewish (for my non-Jewish readers, ask a Jewish friend why it's funny). 

Do We Really Need to Know This?

How would you like to have been the PR person assigned to write the press release accompanying the following headline?

“More than 38 Million Online Americans Shopped While on the Toilet”

Do we really need to know this? I know shopping has become more than just part of the fabric of the American way of life. To many it has become the total blanket. Still, do we really need to know that even on the potty people are dialing up their smartphones so they won’t miss that bargain of a lifetime. It used to be sitting on the john was reserved as “quality” reading time. If you remember the movie The Big Chill, the Jeff Goldblum character, a writer for People, said he and his colleagues were instructed to keep stories short enough so they could be read in total during the time it takes to complete one average dump. 

Anyway, back to the, ahem, news ... A Harris Interactive survey paid for by CashStar, suggests “that more than 38 million online adult Americans admit to having shopped online while on the toilet.” Compare that to “almost 17 million shopping via a mobile device while standing in the retailer's physical store.”

Among the other enlightening though not projectable findings of this online survey of 2,104 adults aged 18 and older conducted Nov. 6-8:

*Potty shopping was more of a male than female activity;

*Shopping online trumps safety as more than four million said they shopped while driving;

*The business of business is business, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that more than nine million said they have secretly shopped while in a business meeting;

*Seven million-plus Americans shopped from their mobile device while at the grocery store.

Get to Work Thursday: I never liked Sunday Blue Laws, the civic ordinances that required retailers to be closed Sundays, or another day of the week if one’s religion celebrated the sabbath on a different schedule that Christian America. Blue Laws mostly vanished in the last 25 years except in some hamlets like Paramus, NJ; some companies, such as Chick-fil-A, remain closed on Sundays because of the religious belief of their founders, Truett Cathy in the case of Chick-fil-A. 

I like having access to stores every day. But I also believe store personnel are entitled to some family life. They should not be deprived of holidays with their families. Or friends. With the exception of drug stores and partial hours for supermarkets, stores should be closed on Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. I’m also okay with no retailing on Christmas and Easter. No one should go into cardiac arrest because they can’t get their Target or Victoria’s Secret fix. Yet these stores, and a whole lot more, have scheduled openings for Thanksgiving. It’s not enough they make workers get to the store before the sun rises for Black Friday sales, now they are thrusting a consumer frenzy mindset onto a day that had always been reserved for family. There’s enough tension already in these family gatherings without the extra hype shopping demands. 

My daughter’s brother-in-law Rob posted a neat idea—“Any stores that start Black Friday shopping on Thanksgiving this year will be getting zero business from us.” He included a list of stores opening on Thanksgiving: 

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/2012ThanksgivingDay11222012/a/2012-Thanksgiving-Day-Store-Hours-Opening-Times-November-22-Complete-Roundup-List_2.htm. It’s going to be pretty hard to stay away from many of these stores, but the sentiment is one worth considering.

Lots of people, nearly half the country, will struggle to shop in stores this weekend, but there’s growing evidence the activity does not rate high on people’s preferred activities. According to Western Union Holiday Gifting Index, 68% of those who shopped on Black Friday last year said they did not think the experience was worth the money they saved. 

I Love You, Craig: As long as we are on the subject of waste matter (see above), Gilda has embarked on a composting binge. All manner of uncooked vegetables, fruits, tea leaves, cooked egg shells and cardboard egg cartons are making their way into our compost pile. Normally, I fill up the pile with free compost from our city municipal dump. But I got there too late this year. Without compost, Gilda’s flower and vegetable garden would not be extraordinary, so we’re now a composting family. 

Composting, however, requires leaves. Lots of leaves. Shredded leaves. The electric blower/shredder I borrowed from my brother last year doesn’t really work (no wonder he let me have it). New electric leaf shredders cost about $200. I opted to try to find a used on on Craig’s List. Score! I found one today 60 miles away in New Jersey for just $25. 

While I’m at a meeting tonight, Gilda will be surprised when she comes home from work and sees the Craftsman Leafwacker Plus where my car usually rests in the garage (don't worry about her finding out before she gets home; she rarely reads my posts the day they go up). I even bagged six large loads of leaves from around the neighborhood. I know what you’re thinking—I’m such a thoughtful husband. There’s lots of truth to that. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m retired and able to spend time, thanks to Craig’s List, fulfilling her dreams.