Wednesday, December 07, 2005
This year's must haves
This festive season we have been told that ‘tech-savy’ kids are shunning the ‘traditional’ (wooden toys? top trumps?) and demanding the “latest in electronic interactive entertainment” (Courier-Mail). And don’t bother trying to second-guess them, just cut the crap, go-ahead and ask them what they want.

We have been told too, what are this year’s ‘in-brands’. If we are to maintain our status as ‘cool parents’ we must buy Simpsons (still), Billabong and some other that I can’t now remember. Oh dear, my tenuous claim to ‘cool’ has been fatally undermined; stress levels have risen a notch.

Christmas has always been a consumption helter-skelter; each year retailers try to out-do not only each other, but also last year’s numbers. Failure to ‘grow the top line’ is synonymous with failure. The advertising is rapacious and in-your-face; newspaper copy reverts from reporting to editorial, demanding we spend more. Magazines feature ‘101 things to make your Christmas perfect’, but instead reveal a further ‘101 more things to get stressed about’.

Also about this time in December, without fail, we are informed by the business community of retailer’s concerns that this year’s sales have yet to match last year’s. Battling families, worried about their household finances, are simply not spending as much. This reluctance to splurge is the harbinger for recession, meltdown, or simply the end of the world as we know it. But thankfully, by the time the silly season is over, consumers have come through again, ensuring that 2005 is every bit the record as last year. We can all rest easy.

But this year, the packaging of Christmas is more bullish than ever. Any semblance that this is the season for giving has been unceremoniously dumped. Forget about being good for Santa; an iPod or roboraptor from the fat old bugger is the minimum expected level of a service delivery. There’s probably even a customer hotline to register consignment discrepancies or report inferior quality goods.

There is a sense of extra urgency, and menace. Business has abandoned any notion that Christmas is anything other than an advertising hook to help shift stock out the door. Christmas lists are not wish lists, but goods manifests, which are presented to your festive benefactor for ticking off. The best magazines even have ready-made lists for you.

Why is business being so militant? Is it just all a result of the constantly shifting trends in advertising - and this year’s fashion is simply, I want? Or is competition between retailers now so intense they have resorted to merely imploring to part with your cash, like a good citizen.

Or is it that the retailers – through their proxies, the advertisers – are genuinely concerned that people just aren’t ‘getting it’ any more. People are becoming increasingly content with what they have in their already over-junked up lives. They are realising that they do nothing for their children when they ask them, unconditionally, what they want for Christmas. Do they now understand that such endless, frenzied binge-buying is wreaking the planet, perhaps not in their backyard, but in China. And what happens in China affect us all.

Business appears threatened by dangerous left-wing fanatics such as Clive Hamilton (author of Affluenza: When more is never enough) and bloggers such as Jason Dykes, who are threatening to bring the entire capitalist super-structure crashing down through their radical nonsensical reluctance to consume. Kathleen Noonan (in a Murdoch paper!) writes of ‘sufficiency’ in what she experiences in life. She needs nor wants anything more or anything less.

Sadly, in reality, these remain fringe views and business can rest easy. And with the passing of John Howard’s Industrial Relations legislation - deregulating the labour market - Australian workers will be free to trade away time spent with their families for more time at the office. Here, they can earn the bucks which pay for the electronic gadgets demanded by their kids, as guilt down-payments for missing out on their kids’ growing-up. We can only afford to assuage this guilt by spending even more time away from who and what we know is important to us.

But perhaps the biggest irony is the festive picture painted by advertisers, of humble and wholesome family enjoyment, spent with loved ones, sharing gifts; a representation far, far removed from the reality of its purpose. Christmas is no longer about being thankful (for the faithful) or even simple enjoyment (for the faith-less), but about pandering to our greedy and callous instincts. Christmas has become the means – the marketing vehicle - where wants and demands and the perpetuation of consumption, become the ends.

Goodwill to all and Merry Christmas.

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