Tomorrow is the beginning of Black Friday

You thought tomorrow was Thanksgiving day? How did we get to this point? Let Fred Reed explain.

Who is going to buy all the junk? Used to be, “production” meant making stuff that people needed. You know: food, clothes, hovels, corn whiskey. There was more demand than supply. Then production in these things, agriculture for example, caught up and everybody had enough to eat. Consequently production went into things people didn´t so much need as want: refrigerators, telephones, Model Ts. Of course pretty soon they came to think that they needed the things they wanted, but never mind. Still, there was more demand than supply. For a while.

Then production again caught up with demand, chiefly through automation. Since people now had everything they needed or wanted, the economy needed to sell them things they didn´t want. There was now more supply than demand, so industry demanded more demand, and advertising stepped in to supply the demand for more demand, the demand for advertising supplying…(this sentence may be getting out of control, but you see what I mean).

The main product of the economy soon became advertising. Twenty minutes of every television hour hosannahed the virtues of indistinguishable shampoos and miraculous toilet paper. Ads turned radio insufferable. Billboards made the big roads hideous. Computers groaned under the weight of spam and pop-ups and buses carried ads on three sides. Buy, buy, buy.