A Kohl’s employee has offered me a mint.

This isn’t what I expected from Thanksgiving night’s Black Friday shopping pandemonium. There was supposed to be chaos and carnage. Frumpy peasants should be tearing each other to shreds for $12 DVD players and this year’s answer to the Cabbage Patch doll.

Instead, the most offensive thing at the Macomb Mall Kohl’s are the shoppers in their pajamas. It’s not even ten o’clock. If we, as a society, short-circuit Thanksgiving for low-paid retail workers so we can indulge in a consumer orgy, the least we can do is wear grown-up pants.

Short of an afternoon trek to Target for toilet paper or sweat socks, I’ve never really participated in the Black Friday thing. My own holiday gift-buying tradition involves an early Sunday morning shopping run or burning a sick day for the task because, even in December, malls and stores are pretty quiet midmorning on a Tuesday. Also, the internet. The internet is seriously the most convenient and civilized way to purchase gifts for loved ones.

However, as the Black Friday hype has increased in recent years and as annual “biggest shopping day” has bled into our Nation’s most sacred secular holiday, curiosity about Black Friday got the better of me. After turkey, et al, I tagged along with a friend who is a veteran of the post-Thanksgiving sales hysteria last Thursday. Our first stop was Kohl’s where, as I say, I’m standing in an orderly checkout line with the promise of unlimited free mints while I wait.

I shouldn’t be surprised by the non-riot. The tales of Black Friday carnage are, like the rest of this annual tradition, mostly myth. Every year there is some kind of incident at some store, but these are isolated events. At most stores, though, the only thing bruised is our collective sense of pride as pajama-clad bargain hunters turn strip malls into makeshift campgrounds.

Much of the Black Friday hype is based on the promise of big savings. However, as the Washington Post reports, many of the deals are artificially created by price inflation. Stores mark-up their merchandise when customers are likely to buy stuff anyway so they can then announce huge sales.

Even the legitimate deals we found Thursday night—my guide spent about $10 at Kohl’s thanks to a couple of coupons that saved her $70—didn’t come from vultureing “doorbusters” so much as taking advantage of ordinary sale prices and coupon promotions.

Kohl’s could offer the same deals at a more civilized hour, say noon on Friday, and save the cost of heating and lighting their store Thursday night? Surely—and I understand that for some people shopping is great fun—their customers wouldn’t object to a few extra hours to linger in Thanksgiving food coma and a good night’s sleep before the shopping begins?

Old Navy, our stop after Kohl’s, drove this point home with a “50% off” everything sale that continued all day Friday. The half-off prices would return, according to a store employee, December 26. With so many opportunities to save big on clothes your cool friends don’t know you own, why were we sifting through piles of blue jeans in the waning hours of Thanksgiving night? Aside from the fact that it’s down the corridor from Kohl’s and we were already at the mall.

The United States is supposed the most advanced and sophisticated consumer economy and yet we’re also suckers for the most shameless marketing gimmicks.

The Serious People’s Black Friday Conversation

The supposed great sales and videos of Middle America losing its shit over discounted frying pans are only half of the Black Friday mythology. Eventually the story pivots to the Very Serious conversation about The Economy: Will people spend more this holiday season than last year?

The answer, as Bloomberg points out, is who knows? The surveys and reports projecting spending are largely bogus based on subjective, self-reported data. No one will really know if this was a good holiday for retailers until January.  Still, business reporters and pundits will spend the next month fretting about whether or not we are buying enough stuff to keep the Dow Jones bullish.

More recently, pundits have also pondered a second question: Will the earlier start to Black Friday boost spending?

No, of course it won’t. This fact is so obvious it’s embarrassing that supposedly educated people might think otherwise. Shoppers will spend what they can spend this holiday season regardless of when they hit the stores. Even if clever marketing compels people to spend more than they budgeted for the holidays, that just means they’ll have to forego other consumer spending opportunities—lunch out with co-workers, movie night, etc.—at other times.

Case in point: My Black Friday guide was unable to find “Fletch” on DVD. Best Buy carried “Ishtar” and Target had multiple copies of both “Troop Beverly Hills,” but we could not find “Fletch” anywhere. The Best Buy clerk checking the inventory admitted he hadn’t even heard of the Chevy Chase classic. But because he was familiar with movies, even those “more than 60 years old.” He recommended “Blind Date” as an alternative title.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Though it won’t be included in any Black Friday sales tallies, a copy of Fletch will be purchased. If the Underhills’ have an Amazon Prime account, we’ll take advantage of free two-day shipping. The point is the actual economic impact of Black Friday is zero.

All this hype may be one way businesses compete for a greater share of the holiday spending pie, but that doesn’t affect the overall economic outlook. Given that they all offer more or less the same deals, the competition pretty much cancels itself out.

Two Sides Of The Same Coin

This economic reality also undercuts the Black Friday boycott argument from groups like Adbusters. While there is a strong case that stores needn’t reopen Thursday night—it unnecessarily robs their employees of sharing in the holiday—the supposed post-Thanksgiving consumer gluttony is nothing more than a concentration of spending that would happen anyway.

Ultimately, the Black Friday boycotts reinforce the fundamental problem with things like Black Friday—they reduce our primary social purpose to that of consumer.

American Express’ Small Business Saturday effort falls into this same trap. Ignore for a second that American Express is an integral component of a financial services industry that has devoted three decades to driving down middle-class salaries in the name of meeting short-term profit projections, thus making bargain-hunting at Kohl’s a necessity for most people. The way to fight the negative effects of omnipresent consumerism is to shop differently? I do not accept that.

Our moral existence should not be defined by the sum of the parts of our consumer purchases. It’s one thing to avoid enterprises that mistreat their workers (cough Wal Mart cough) or the planet, but so long as a business operates in a reasonably “do no harm” manner, the rest shouldn’t matter. Not the job creation, not the economic impact, not the “giving back,” and certainly not the call to be a part of the conversation/movement/whatever.

We cannot make the world a better place by shopping. Not by shopping more. Not by shopping more responsibly. Not by shopping more locally.

That’s not to advocate an ascetic existence. I buy books I could probably borrow from the library because I like owning books. Shopping for electronics can be fun. As is getting fitted for a new suit. I’m an unapologetic capitalist in fact, and like all true capitalists, I recognize the market doesn’t exist to make the world a better place. It exists to bring goods and services to customers.

Want to make the world a better place? Donate to Doctors Without Borders.

I am fatigued, honestly fatigued, by the constant drumbeat for our consumer decisions to have more importance and purpose than they actually have. I want my consumer spending to have no significance, purpose, or ideology. Or as little as possible.

The moral calculus by which average Americans are increasingly expected weigh every economic decision does not make us more responsible economic participants. It only helps to suborn (right word? Subjugate?) all other values to the consumer economy. What’s more, these decisions are not as cut-and-dry as they first appear.

Should you buy a Ford assembled in Michigan from mostly overseas parts or a Toyota made mostly in the American south?

Does this Amazon purchase harm the bookseller at Barnes And Noble or aid the postman who delivers the package?

The seemingly anti-consumer ethos of the “socially responsible consumer” ideology still reduces us to cogs in an economic machine.

I buy dog food at Target because I need dog food, not because Target gives blah blah blah percent of their profit to “the community.” I don’t want to complete a survey about the service at Taco Bell because, ideally, I don’t want to have to think about the service at Taco Bell. When I do shop at local/independent businesses, it is because they offer unique goods or services, or level of service. And I really, really don’t see why retailers need me to venture out late on a cold winter night just to get a sale price.

There must be a way that our need to make rational economic decisions can coexist with a sustainable and egalitarian society, where all who wish to participate can achieve some reasonable measure of success, without making every trip to the store a moral dilemma.

Black Friday and all its variants and backlashes are, in essence, the same a High Holiday celebrating a false theology that our existential purpose is to consume, and to consume in the “proper manner.”

All the efforts to measure holiday shopping or to give it meaning—as Bobby Kennedy once said of the gross national product—“measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

What did I learn from shopping on Thanksgiving? That no one should ever try to learn anything from shopping ever again.