The quirky, anti-consumerist history of Buy Nothing Day
Don’t buy, Felicia
Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, when the dutiful shoppers of America maul one another at Best Buy, is nigh upon us. But some people will observe it by buying absolutely nothing. Buy Nothing Day is an international day of anti-consumerist protest.
The day — which now also goes by the name Occupy Xmas — was founded by Ted Dave, a Canadian artist in 1992, but it gained traction through the 90s after activist magazine Adbusters magazine began to promote it. You may know Adbusters from another one of their international campaigns, TV Turn Off Week. Oh, and Occupy Wall Street? Yeah, they invented that, too.
Buy Nothing Day, on which participants are urged to buy literally nothing — including subway fare — is now observed in over 65 countries. It sounds a bit heavy, but rather than a dour disavowal of capitalism, Buy Nothing Day is characterized by playful antics, like cutting up credit cards in public places, “Whirl-marts,” where participants push empty shopping carts through stores in a conga line, and “zombie walks,” where they walk through shopping malls doing their best Walking Dead impersonation. According to the Netherlands Workshop for Sustainable Development, “Buy Nothing Day is a day of cheerful and critical protest against Western over-consumption.” Of course, some people express their cheer by doing things entirely unrelated to consumerism, like hiking or hosting free street parties.
Anti-consumerism has roots in leftist social theory of the 19th and 20th centuries, notably Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 treatise, A Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, in which the Norwegian-American sociologist argued that modern notions of leisure and luxury are unfortunate feudal holdovers. (Veblen is the guy who gave us the phrase “conspicuous consumption” — useful in the age of President-elect Trump’s gilded furniture.)
There are conflicting stories surrounding the origins of Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving Day. Many agree that the term came into circulation around 1951, when Philadelphia police and bus drivers used it to gripe about downtown streets congested with shoppers. But the practice reached peak insanity in 2011, when some stores like Target, Kohl’s, and Macy’s, opened their doors as early as midnight — yes, pretty much the day before — to give shoppers ample time to buy. Last year, REI, purveyor of expensive camping gear, announced it would close its stores on Friday. The company launched the #OptOutside campaign, urging consumers to spend the day outdoors, buying nothing.
Critics argue that Buy Nothing Day is a kind of empty gesture, a way of making die-hard shoppers feel bad but one that doesn’t have any discernible impact on the global economy or on consumer sentiment as a whole. Some think the majority of participants in Buy Nothing Day may just be shopping at the same retailers the following day, anyway. Which introduces class politics into the Buy Nothing Day phenomenon. In other words, shoppers who have the means to spend more, and more selectively, have the privilege of sitting Black Friday out, and feeling smug about it.
Still, many argue that as big box stores prepare for hordes of sale-crazed shoppers (the day after a holiday ostensibly devoted to serene gratitude), they should also have to prepare for a little backlash. If it comes in the form of zombies stalking their aisles, so be it.
