#419 Big Day

On the first shopping day of the holiday season Christmas crashed. No, dear old Saint Nick didn’t swerve the sled into a concrete abutment. Not like Rudolph’s red nose wouldn’t have got him pulled over for a little field sobriety test by the Xmas emphasis patrol. No, like most things this century, it was all about the computers. You may remember that last year there was footage of crazed people trampling one another on their way to a Wal-Mart doorbuster. Well apparently, some of the big retailers decided that was negative publicity they didn’t need. So, seeing the success of Ebay, some of the big box stores went little box. CPU-type box. They promoted cyber-Christmas in a big way. But they screwed up, because they did cyber-Christmas doorbusters. And it turns out electronic doors are easier to bust. Now first off, the “get up at the crack of dawn and wait for a store to open” phenomenon is a social tradition in itself. Seems like our society says the big reward for ma and the girls is to slave all day making turkey, stuffing, and the whole tryptophan sedative pharmocopia, encourage the menfolk to fall asleep to the football game and then the next morning, get up at the crack of dawn and shop like a maniac. Personally, if I got up early and worked all day slaving over a hot meal, the last thing I’d do the next day would be to get up even earlier and wait in the cold with a crowd of people whose chief motivator in life is greed. But that’s just me. I don’t like falling asleep to a football game either. Still, maybe this ancient tradition derives from the necessity for mom to drug dad so while he’s sprawled in a snorefest on the porko-lounger recliner she can sneak his bacon-earning wallet out of his pocket. Then get all that painful shopping done as budget conscious as possible before Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson know best. But part of the post-thanksgiving experience is the social aspect of all the bargain hens gathering. So it’s hard to conceive of folks getting up early to shop in their own home. Maybe that’s why corporate America wasn’t prepared. Forget for a moment the challenge of having a “first 50 shoppers get a free ginsu knife set” doorbuster when you live in a country with 4 time zones. You also got the whole international aspect of the internet. What’s to stop shoppers on the other side of the dateline from getting stuff yesterday? It’s also the fact that crowds suffer from physical limitation. You can only fit a few people through a door at a time. Translated to cyberspace that means you can only have so many shoppers in your data pipe at a time. Unfortunately, at the physical store that means you may get an occasional trampling but at least the store itself stays intact. In cyberspace too many in the pipe means the people survive but the whole store is destroyed. And Christmas crashes like a trainset assembled after too many eggnogs.
America, ya gotta love it.