At a Wal-Mart outside Nashville, the doors opened at 5 a.m. yesterday, with customers surrounding a wooden pallet piled high with $50 digital picture frames at the front of the store.
Worried that the frames would sell out, Cindy Chavez, 36, braced herself, yelped and tossed her body on top of the pile, much to her fellow shoppers’ horror. She emerged from the scrum with six frames.
“I just didn’t think I could reach down and bend over and get it,” Ms. Chavez explained.
If this were a movie scene we would scoff at it as "too much Hollywood". And we cannot claim that this was an isolated incident, because many major retailers opened their doors at 4 am or even earlier. We have become, quite literally, lunatic shoppers.
Good luck to us all.
Good luck to us all.
And lunatic consumers.
ReplyDeleteThe fate of the world economy is rest on mad American shoppers.....as long as they are mad enough we can keep going...
ReplyDeleteI (French, aged 45) do not look at new gadgets as often as I did in the past. In fact I just discovered those digital picture frames. I asked the young guy who sold them about the resolution. He had to ask someone else in the store because he didn't know what I was talking about. When he came back he told me something like 720x680, ie about 15 times less than todays digital cameras resolution (if we take an average of 7 Mpixels). He didn't understand why I LOLed.
ReplyDeleteMuch more interesting: Swiss Re lost 1,2 Billion USD because of a CDS degraded from AAA to CCC in one go. It was the first time I saw an article decribing exactly what happened (what a CDS exactly is). It was in the German FAZ last week. We, the public, have no clue about the risks taken in the new "financial industry".
And another information: tomorrow, Saturday 25 November, our president Sarkozy will be in China to sign a contract about 2 nuclear powerplants of the latest generation (EPR). I heard in the radio that this is the first time such a huge contract (about 5 billion) will be signed in Euros. Strange when the Chinese own so much USD...
Arnould, Paris, France
mere speculation
ReplyDeletebut i think because the French are dying for the Yuan to be revalued upwards to the Euro...
and i think the idea is that euro-denominated contract might make the chinese more likely to choose to save the French..
And you wonder why we are in such deep debt? People up to their eyeballs in debt, buying things they don't need.
ReplyDeleteIn Belgium as well, lunacy has spread amongst the shopping populace. Fiendish Christmas shoppers frolic in the streets of central Antwerp and Brussels - starting as early as October has become de rigueur. The few malls we have are simply overflowing with rabid people, viciously wielding credit cards and leaden wallets. Altogether, a horrific scene. There is a desperate need for more malls and retail space. Much more! We also need to de-unionize and guarantee malls stay open longer – I mean, of course we run each other over, get squashed in automatic doors, decapitate the poor store aid, they’re only open until 6 pm! Scandalous!
ReplyDeleteHere's a video of the shopping madness:
ReplyDeleteMall Madness 2007
http://tinyurl.com/yowoos
Re: Mall madness video from anon.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that just about everyone rushing into the store was very young - seemed like mostly teenagers with a smattering of low 20's. Overlooking the obvious business conclusions (i.e. this was not about shopping so much as about having a good time with friends)...
....if it ever comes to it, does anyone think these kids will fight for America? I don't mean volunteer into a professional army with pay, but a draft.
God forbid that it should happen, but what are the ideals they would be fighting for? I shudder at the thought.
What do you want from the kids? Didn't Bush tell us to "go shopping" after 9/11? Did Bush think seeing Americans at the malls would scare Osama Bin Laden? Is he crazy? Americans need to be told the truth: Uncle Sam is bankrupt, he can't pay and we need to consume less. Bush, while claiming to be a Christian, practices another religion. One of the tenets of the religion is not that Jesus died at Calvary for our sins, but that our redemption is the result of conspicuous consumption.
ReplyDelete....if it ever comes to it, does anyone think these kids will fight for America?
ReplyDeleteDo you mean fight an offensive war or a defensive war? Hopefully they will resist participation in wars of aggression.
Things must have gotten real ugly when the pallet of ginsu knives showed up.
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to the real meaning of Christmas? I was one of those early bird shoppers and I left the store and decided to shopped online. I made a list, set a budget, and with a little time, I found nice gifts from well known stores. It saved me gas money, eating out money and in a long run shipping money. I rather go to the mall when the all the lunatics are at home wrapping the gift that they bought and can't afford.
ReplyDeleteBut why don't they just open the doors a little more? Of course they're all squashed; they have to enter through like, one or two open doors. And those cops were useless, just in the way.
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