The day following Thanksgiving was “Black Friday” in the United States, official start of the Christmas shopping season. While the phrase ”Black Friday” originally emerged in the 1960s to refer to the heavy traffic on the streets of Philadelphia on this day, today it is usually described as the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or become “in the black”. It is also a day noted for the unruly crowds of shoppers who flood stores, even occasionally trampling employees to death in stampedes.
In 1991, Adbusters Magazine declared this day “Buy Nothing Day” and urged us to consider how dependent we are on conspicuous consumption. My active engagement with anti-consumerism began in 1997 when I watched John de Graaf and Vivia Boe’s one-hour groundbreaking movie Affluenza, which aired on PBS. This event brought the topic of consumerism to a much wider audience and vastly increased public awareness. Since then I have continued to use this film in my classes at Ventura College and at Antioch University Santa Barbara.
“Affluenza” has been defined as “ a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more” (John de Graaf, 2001, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic).