Avarice in the shopping aisle

I finished re-reading A Christmas Carol late on Christmas Eve. In the tale, which originally appeared 170 years ago, Dickens paints a picture of the wages of a man’s avarice. Although the story is well known, some of the more interesting points of the narrative are not. Case in point is the author’s commentary on Malthusian views of poor people, which do not figure into modern interpretations of the story. Nevertheless, the central theme of how Scrooge allows his greed to overshadow the spirit of Christmas, or more importantly our duty to our fellow humans, remains central to the message. By the end of the book, Scrooge (as well as the reader) learns that there is more to life than material wealth and that our connection to others is what makes our lives complete.

It seems that we live in a world where our desires for trinkets and gadgets outweigh the feelings and familial connections of those who are not as fortunate. We want to buy our goods when it is convenient for us, whether our actions have consequences or not. Thus, if we want to shop on Thanksgiving, then we expect the stores to be open and enough workers to be there to run the tills to satisfy our demands. Never mind that we could wait a few hours to complete our shopping; or, plan ahead and do our shopping a little early. This year major retail stores broke a taboo by opening on Thanksgiving. The effect is that many people, with a low salaried jobs, were forced to give up a meaningful holiday with their families to service those of us chasing a good deal. In fact, those deals are probably suspect. Now that Thanksgiving Day has been added to the list of shopping days it is hard to imagine that Christmas is not too far behind. Christmas will be the next new major shopping day for people who did not do their shopping before or are looking for post-Christmas sales early. The result will be, despite the rhetorical idea of Christmas as a day to spend with family and loved ones, more people will be forced to come to work to satisfy our avarice. 

A rare sight: Walmart closed