Everything Reduced! Buy! Buy!
The Making of Poverty. Autumn spending and household debt.
From the end of October 2018 to the start of the New Year there are five major spending events in the UK. Halloween on the 31st October. Bonfire Night on the 5th November. Black Friday on the 26th November. Cyber Monday is next on the 28th November. Everything Reduced! Buy, Buy! Laptops, TVs, Smartphones! Then we are in the home straight accelerating towards Christmas which is the nation’s fifth end of year spending event. One steeped in traditions that include high street Boxing Day stampedes and lengthy New Year queues.
Halloween
Once a Celtic festival celebrating the arrival of autumn Halloween is now a significant spending event in the UK. This October there are more pumpkins than ever in shops and supermarkets along with displays of Halloween customs, masks, games and snacks. In 2016 consumers spent £310 million on Halloween products which rose to an estimated £320 million in 2017. Up from £230 million in 2013, an increase of £90 million. In 2017 the estimated spending on pumpkins alone came to over £25 million. How do we understand the increasing retailing of Halloween when many households are struggling to cope with government austerity policies? How many families splashed out, despite the impact of austerity policies, to avoid children feeling ‘left out’?
Bonfire Night
Bonfire Night in the UK is a celebration of the failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It is another spending event that drains the wallets and purses of parents struggling to make ends meet. UK consumers spent an estimated £497 million on Bonfire Night in 2017, up from over £350 million in 2015. This year a bewildering variety of fireworks are displayed in supermarkets and advertised online. In one supermarket a pack of ‘Air strike Rockets’ costs £20; 3 ‘Chrome sparklers’: £1.50; an ‘Inferno selection box’: £22.50; a ‘Powershock Barrage’ pack: £100. Bonfire night on the 5th November is now beyond excessive with some Councils refusing to hold firework displays. There are roughly a thousand injured by fireworks each year and the barrage of noise is a nightmare for those with mental health issues, especially Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Black Friday is not a reference to the ‘Friday’ character in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe but an American custom that celebrates extreme spending as a coup de grâce to Thanksgiving, before becoming an overture to Yuletide. It is now a major household buying event in the UK with consumers spending £1.39 billion online in 2017. As increasing numbers of these transactions are completed on tablets and smartphones Black Friday is expanding across national borders and has become such a popular global event it is now being described as a ‘festival’. A spending festival for private consumers, that is, rather than a rite of passage celebrated locally.
Christmas
Everything Reduced! Buy, Buy! Laptops, TVs, Smartphones! Ten months ago it was reported average household Christmas spending in 2017 would be £751, down from £822 in 2013; but UK consumer spending during the Halloween, Bonfire Night and Black Friday events has steadily increased between 2013 and 2017 as numerous reports have shown. If we add Black Friday’s e-commerce spending in 2017, £1.39 billion, to the reported consumer Christmas spending figures the decline turns into a surge! (More research in this area is required.)
Actual ‘Christmas’ spending may be declining because Black Friday is replacing Christmas as the main end of year spending festival. The importance to global corporations of the e-commerce show compared to Christmas and Boxing Day festivities should not be underestimated according to a number of observers. UK households are now spending in October and November well in advance of Christmas in December; a process that is accelerated by the latest tech products and shiny new smartphones.
UK household debt in June 2018 was £1.6 trillion, the average being £58,540. Far from being in the black many households are in the red spending £900 more on mortgages and credit card debts than they earn. Spending events like Black Friday may push red households further into debt. Such events after all are for big business and global corporations rather than consumers struggling to make ends meet. As household debts increase e-commerce profits soar and are often under taxed. This process is not only making households poorer but institutionalises poverty so that it becomes the status quo, along with the human misery, social damage and costs to the state.
Meanwhile the debtor is like the holder of the single spluttering sparkler in Kristopher Roller’s brilliant image: submerged by the deep ocean waters of debt that will quickly extinguish the few remaining sparkles, with a fizzle rather than a bang. Excalibur?
Dream on.
