The Black Friday Frenzy: Harnessing The Power of the Masses

I would like to spend some time discussing the fascinating display of human behavior that we witnessed this past Friday, a day of the year known as “Black Friday” (the day that retailers can expect to “get out of the red” and begin to turn a profit) and the day that supposedly officiates the beginning of the Christmas shopping frenzy.

Somehow, corporations and shopping malls have tapped into an element of human nature that drives people to stay up all night long and stampede the stores in droves for this “American tradition” of consumption. Tens of thousands of people line up in front of megastores beginning Wednesday afternoon, many having left their families and friends during the Thanksgiving holiday, in order to get in line for these highly publicized sales on gadgets, goods, and gifts.

Fun fact: Every year the number of people who are shopping, both online and in-stores on Black Friday, the nationally recognized event that takes place the day after Thanksgiving, is growing.  This year, my fellow Americans, we broke records with approximately 75% of the United States, yes, 3 in 4 people, were shopping this past "Black Friday Weekend".  According to the National Retail Federation surveys, the estimated 226 million people (of the entire population of the US: 307 million) is up from 212 million last year. Yikes.

Another fun fact: Approximately 125 million Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election. (That’s of about 231 million people who are 18+ in the United States.)

So what are those retailers doing right? How are they inspiring such immense participation? Most importantly, what can we learn from this to ignite the masses in a similar way (minus the use-of-pepper-spray mentality, one typically saved for peacefully protesting students on the UC campuses, ahem, I digress)  towards productive and socially responsible means? Like voting, perhaps…

I eagerly await the year when Election Day is celebrated with a level of emphatic popular participation comparable to what we see on Black Friday, with people lining around the block for days in advance to cast their vote for what they believe in.

So what is it about Black Friday that so dramatically piques the interest of the American masses? 

Well, for starters, the strategy and preparation that goes into maximizing shopping on Black Friday is quite impressive, both on the part of the shoppers and the retailers alike. The lesson here?  Easy to use, easy to understand preparation materials can be a game-changer when it comes to being involved.  Educating people on the importance of voting and the issues at hand in an approachable and understandable fashion definitely has the potential to rouse the interest of voters and increase informed participation.

(Confession: I don’t read those books that are sent in the mail prior to an election with the dense Arial font writing outlining the details of the things we can vote on in dry and long-winded passages. I mean really, who does? Shhh...)

Bumper sticker by one of my heroes, Ani DiFranco

What else works? 

Having the day off…  If people had to go to work on that Friday, I imagine that not too many stores would be “out of the red” on that infamous day after Thanksgiving, alas, it would be a day like any other. I think that this should be our very first step towards increasing voter participation and sending the message that the voice of the people is so valuable, we’ll shut down the work force to let it be heard. Let’s make it convenient to vote! One sure-fire way to demotivate people to vote is to add it to their already long to-do list after they work an eight hour day in the middle of the week. This needs to be a nationally recognized day off of school and work.

So what more does Black Friday have going for it? 

Well, lots of cool stuff to buy, and we Americans, we certainly love our stuff.  So what of that… Could we incentivize voting somehow in conjunction with increasing knowledge of the election issues? One opinion writer, Matt Miller, of the Washington Post, describes his idea to implement a lottery system in which there was an actual cash prize for a few lucky vote-casting Americans… Certainly an interesting thought, a potentially controversial one, but intriguing, nonetheless.

Here's another thing that Americans love to do as shown by the Black Friday Frenzy… spend money! The same opinion writer, Matt Miller, suggests that every voter ought to be given 50 publicly funded “patriot dollars” to contribute to the candidate of their choice in order to offset private campaign investment.  (Spending someone else’s money… even better!!) Enabling people to be personally invested in the election would be an innovative way to increase participation, not to mention the added benefit of candidates having to appeal to individual voters in all of the states! (Not to worry, I’ll certainly write an aggravated Electoral College spiel in a future blahg sometime.)

All that said, I feel quite strongly that it is possible to invigorate the involvement of our populous in the democratic process. It is not only about making the process more convenient and understandable (though that's essential), most importantly of all it's about redesigning the electoral system overall to make us feel like we, the people, matter. It seems that we have a disillusioned population on our hands, many of us (myself included, at times) among them, and that is a sad state of affairs. Until we are assured that each individual vote truly makes a difference, and that the people we are voting for earnestly care about our day-to-day lives so much that they will ask us for our individual and important vote, our voting turnout will remain abysmal.

It’s time to get creative, to think outside of the box, and to reinstate our long lost democratic system.

Special shout-out to my fix-the-world-one-heated-social-commentary-debate-at-a-time buddy, Chris Garrettson, for hashing out these ideas with me.