Black Friday/ Buy Nothing

by amfreedman

On Sunday morning I woke up to the news of the factory fire in Bangladesh. At least 111 are dead, and some are still missing. The tragedy is being compared to one of the worst industrial disasters in American history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which claimed the lives of 146 victims, many of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, most of them women. Like the employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the victims at the Tazreen Fashions factory were primarily women, who dominate garment industry production worldwide; the building had insufficient fire exits, so workers fled to upper floors to escape the fire, and some jumped to their deaths. Tazreen Fashions supplied Walmart as recently as May 2011, when it was cited for safety violations. Walmart claims it no longer uses Tazreen as a supplier, but confirmed that one of its suppliers had “subcontracted” back to Tazreen without authorization. The Nation has photos of Walmart clothing in the debris of the fire.  The inquiry that followed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster resulted in significant changes for factory standards and worker safety: better exits, mandatory alarms and sprinkler systems, shorter hours for women and children, and the growth of labor unions that  further protected worker safety and rights. What changes will come out of the tragedy in Dhaka, where labor is so cheap that even China has begun to outsource production to Bangladesh?

In other weekend news, two men were shot outside a Walmart in Tallahassee, Florida, in a fight over a parking spot. In Atlanta, outside another Walmart, a shoplifter was  throttled to death by a security guard for shoplifting.  Spending over the weekend hit 52.4 billion dollars.  And people bought, you know, a lot of stuff.

Buy Nothing day corresponds to Black Friday, and serves as a boycott of consumer culture on the day when we’re likely to consume most flagrantly. At my local co-op, Buy Nothing day is observed on Sunday, rather than Friday, so they can turn the entire day into a celebration. The shelves are covered in burlap, the staff serves free cake and coffee, and local musicians come and play music. I’ve been going for years, and besides the obvious benefit of feeling less anxiety about the chain of supply I’ve watched a community grow around the place. Children that I met at the co-op as infants will be entering high school next year.

Changing consumption habits is difficult because products just leap into your hands; I mean, you walk down the street and bargains throw themselves at you, they stick to you like burrs in the woods. It isn’t that you seek them out, it’s that you need to constantly be turning them away. They call your name, they come into your email box, they say, like the old lusts in Augustine’s confessions, do you really think you can live without us? I’ve made some small changes, and even those can be a struggle to keep. We don’t shop at Walmart, though that’s as much to do with a hatred of driving and big box shopping as it has to do with ethical consumption. I’ve started to purge my email of some of those panders, the groupons and living socials, so that I don’t invite temptation, or slip and fall into a four hundred thread count sheet set or a weekend up North. Since last Spring, when shopping for myself, I’ve only bought used clothes or clothes that are locally made. I don’t mean to be shrill or smug—god knows I’m still drowning in stuff, and the most ethical kind of consumption is to simply buy less. I’m going to keep that in mind this holiday season, as I walk around like a grinch on Wordsworth muttering to myself, “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”

Besides, there are powerful compensations to turning your face away from big-box store bulimia: supporting local businesses, developing relationships with people in your neighborhood, buying quirky or original gifts that aren’t mass-produced, creatively repurposing clothes that other people have discarded, taking it grandpa style. You could shop used and local because it’s the right thing to do, or you could just do it to be fabulous.