Stuff This

I’m not sure where the origin of Black Friday came from.  The only Black Friday I can think of was Robinson Crusoe’s buddy.  Anyway I thought this might be appropriate since we are coming up on Black Friday to start the shopping frenzy portion of the year.  I don’t know if you have ever heard Delbert McClinton’s song, “Too Much Stuff” or listened to George Carlin’s great monologue on “Stuff” but we Americans have more Stuff than anyone on the planet.

We have so much stuff, we don’t have room to keep all of it at home.  We have to rent places, known as self-storage, simply to keep our stuff. To give you an example, America now has over 40,000 self-storage sites.  All of Europe has only 1350 sites and Mexico just has 250 places to store their stuff.  I think they put a lot of their stuff in jalapenos.  

Of course we have all of this stuff because we keep buying more of it.  The reason we keep buying more stuff is that our economy depends on it.  If we don’t buy more stuff, businesses will go out of business and people will lose their jobs.  And, if there is nobody making stuff, then there is no stuff for us to buy; but since we don’t have a job we don’t have the money to buy more stuff anyway.  If this seems like a never ending loop; it is.  And if this seems depressing; it is.

I’m not sure exactly how we got here, but I have an idea.  The Indians who were the original Americans didn’t seem to have a lot of stuff and neither did the Pilgrims that came over and evicted them.  In fact for hundreds of years, most people didn’t have a lot of stuff.  You just had what you needed to get by on.  Somewhere along the line, we started buying more stuff.

The change seems to have started with the advent of advertising.  You know Christmas wasn’t really a big deal for thousands of years until the first advertising people convinced the retailers what a great time it was for selling us more stuff.  

Since then the advertising world has convinced us, (John Q. Public), that we are too fat, too skinny, too ugly, too poor, too bored, and just plain not good enough the way we are.  That what we needed was stuff.  Stuff to makes us happier, prettier, richer, and better than the next person.  So now we are bombarded everyday on the TV, radio, newspapers, the Internet or as we are driving down the highway about more stuff we need to buy. 

I’m not sure how we break the stuff cycle but we might try by asking ourselves one question.  When do we have enough stuff?



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