Well, for me, Black Friday wasn’t a spend nothing day. I bought some groceries, and I also bought a few Christmas gifts online. I’m glad I wasn’t out in the Christmas rush.
By now, we have all heard that an employee at a Walmart was killed during the Christmas shopping rush. I don’t know which is more horrifying – that people were so eager to get into a store that they knocked down a door and crushed a man or that people saw the man on the ground and stepped over him in their rush to get to the sale items and couldn’t be bothered to stop. A “great deal” on a tv or a gaming system was worth more than stopping to help a man.
I have always thought Christmas was overcommercialized, and am working on a post about that, but I wanted to briefly discuss Black Friday’s events. What does it say about our society that we place so much value on items and material things that we resort to pushing and shoving and fighting. It seems the sort of thing that would happen in an area where people are starving and the “material things” were instead food and water. I can understand why people fight over food and water. I will never understand fighting over a fancy tv.
Even though I wasn’t part of the Black Friday rush, I think that we all, myself included, need to take a step back and really look at our consumerism. Maybe we’re all a little guilty of forgetting what’s really important.
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
And most people probably didn’t have the money to buy those things and had to put them on credit cards. So they were in a big rush to go deeper into debt. When I was 17, my boss (at the time) commented on how he was STILL paying for a Christmas spending spree he’d gone on two years earlier. That always stayed with me and made quite an impact. I was able to stay at home the whole day, I loved it.
Let me say up front that this is not a defense of what happened. This man died in a terrible way for a terrible reason, and what I’m about to say in no way excuses that.
However, many, if nt most, of the people in the crowd would have been in a position where, if they had stopped to help this man, or even took a moment to go around him, they would have been risking getting trampled as well. In fact, as I recall, several people nearly were (I recall hearing about a woman in late stages of her pregnancy getting injured).
So while I would never condone what happened, I do have some compassion for people who were stuck in a kill-or-be-killed situation.