The problem with economic blackouts.

Back in my simple living days, one of the practices I adopted, and still do most years, is to observe Buy Nothing Day. It's always the day after Thanksgiving (that's the day after the fourth Thursday in November, if you're not an American), which is also known as Black Friday -- aka the day retailers typically make enough money on Christmas sales to put them in the black for the year. The idea is to consciously refuse to participate in the sort of shopping behavior that used to cause mobs to line up before stores opened at 6:00 a.m. and stampede to buy the low, low priced doorbuster items before they ran out.

I honestly don't know whether Buy Nothing Day ever made a dent in sales at the big-box stores. I do know that shopping habits have changed over the past 20 to 25 years. Now, a lot of folks shop online, and Black Friday has become a multiweek juggernaut. I'm certain you've noticed. We now have "Early Black Friday" sales that start weeks before Thanksgiving; Small Business Saturday; Cyber Monday; and so on. (There's also a Giving Tuesday, when you're supposed to make a donation to your favorite charity.) 

The thing is that shoppers -- even the Buy Nothing folks -- still spend as much on holiday gifts as they ever did, or maybe more. They just shop on a different day than the day after Thanksgiving.

Which brings me to this coming Friday... and the weeks ahead. 

One of my daughters texted this meme to me. I'm sure you've seen similar ones floating around on social media. For starters, we're all supposed to avoid spending any money at all this Friday, February 28th. There are exceptions for critical things such as medicine. And participants are encouraged to make purchases that day, if they do have to shop, from small, local businesses. 

The original aim was to hurt the bottom lines of companies that have rolled back DEI -- diversity, equity, and inclusion -- policies. But it has somehow morphed into a new Buy Nothing Day.

I'm going to participate. But I don't know how much of a dent it will make for us to curtail discretionary spending for a single day. Just like on the traditional Buy Nothing Day, people who keep their debit cards in their wallets this coming Friday will likely just shift their shopping to another day. And just like with Buy Nothing Day, there's no good way to gauge how much of an impact a one-day boycott will make on these giant corporations, because that's not how companies report their earnings. As a financial literacy instructor told Newsweek: "While these blackouts are normally done with the hope of positive implications, the reality is past data indicates they lead to little financial data from most major companies. At the end of the day, even if consumers support the cause, they're going to continue to fulfill their purchasing needs and desires."

As for the follow-up boycotts and economic blackout days: do we really think most Americans have an attention span long enough to remember not to buy General Mills products at the end of April? I'm not even sure the enthusiasm will carry through mid-March.

No, I believe that if we really want to make an impression on corporate America, the answer is to quit our conspicuous consumption habit entirely. 

Right after 9/11 happened, President Bush the Younger (satirist Molly Ivins used to call him Shrub to differentiate him from his father) went on TV to address the country, and one thing he said kind of stuck out like a sore thumb for me. He told us that no matter what, we should not stop shopping. I swear I am not making this up. Yes, you're scared; yes, the U.S. is under attack; yes, your government is going to find the perpetrators and make them pay; but don't let it stop you from spending money at the mall. 

Why did he say that? Because retail sales are a huge driver of our economy. It depends on regular people regularly buying stuff we only think we need. If people had quit shopping in the wake of 9/11, the economy would have tanked. 

You want to cut into the power our corporate overlords have over us? Quit giving them your money. And not just for a day or a week. Permanently. Or as permanently as you can manage it.

That is probably a bridge too far right now, when some folks may be using retail therapy to avoid paying attention to the shitshow in DC. Although the newly unemployed among the federal workforce, and those to lose their jobs shortly when the ripple effects take hold, may be forced to cut back on their spending anyway. But for the rest of us: think about it.

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There are also calls for a national strike on Friday, March 14th. Unfortunately, I can't take that day off; the legislature will still be in session for another week after that. But maybe you can.

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These moments of conspicuously consumptive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Tidying up, or: The simple living backlash.

Shofuso Japanese Cultural Center, Philadelphia
Copyright 2018 Lynne Cantwell

This past week, much was made on social media of advice supposedly given by Marie Kondo. Kondo, who is Japanese, has been described as a decluttering guru. She has made a career out of helping people get rid of their excess stuff. She now has a reality show on Netflix in which, I'm told, she visits couples who need to make their living space more livable and makes suggestions on how they could do it. She brings a Shinto aesthetic to the process, thanking the house for providing shelter and thanking each individual thing for its service to the household. And then, she says, if you hold the thing and it doesn't spark joy in you, out it should go, to someone in whom it would spark joy.

The thing that set people off was a comment about her view of books. She says she has gone through her collection and now keeps just 30 books. Total. She says that feels like the right number to her.

To which the booklovers of America collectively retorted, "You'll get my books when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands." 

Well, words to that effect, anyway.

I saw someone on Twitter sniff that Americans' criticism of Kondo stems from racism. I don't agree. I do think she comes from a culture where living spaces are smaller and where extremely spare decorating schemes seem to be the ideal. In the Indie Wire interview that I linked to above, Kondo admits that. And she also says her book-collecting advice is practical in Japan, where the humid climate rapidly damages books. There, if you're not going to read a book, it's better for the book to be passed along.

Also in that interview, she says, "The question you should be asking is what do you think about books. If the image of someone getting rid of books or having only a few books makes you angry, that should tell you how passionate you are about books, what’s clearly so important in your life." And if you're that passionate about books, and you have the room, then by all means, keep as many as you want. In other words, when you're decluttering, keep only things that are meaningful to you.

That's advice that's not specific to any culture. I first heard it twenty years ago in a book called Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. Their idea was to pare your living expenses to essentials while building up your savings and investments, with the aim of retiring early. Paring your expenses necessarily means bowing out of most of the consumer culture that's so prevalent in the West. Besides, the more stuff you own, the more time you have to spend cleaning and maintaining it. Pretty soon, your stuff owns you.

I was active in the simple living movement for several years, but gradually drifted away. It got harder and harder to keep a lid on my expenses; something always seemed to throw a monkey wrench into my plans to save. These days, I know it was partly because while prices have kept going up, wages have been stagnant in this country for the past four decades -- basically my entire working life. 

Anyway, my point is that Ms. Kondo is simply the face of the newest iteration of a philosophy of living that has been around for a long, long time. It's not a bad idea to consider, every now and then, whether you own your stuff, or whether your stuff owns you. 

And feel free to own as many books as you like. I do.

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These moments of sparsely-furnished blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Confessions of a marketing skeptic.

So here we are, in week two of my test run for sharing my blog posts as Facebook Notes. It seems to be as good a time as any to make a confession: This is basically the only marketing-type thing I've done for my books in months. Why? Because I have an innate suspicion, bordering on irrational fear, of anything that has to do with marketing.

There, I said it. And I apologize in advance to my friends who work in marketing, because the rest of this post is going to be about why this is so.

For starters, I came up through journalism. It's hard to believe now, but in those days journalists thought themselves above any involvement with filthy lucre. Yes, we did our jobs and got paid for them -- but we were supposed to be discerning about the topics we covered. If we were asked to write about a new store or a new product, it had better have something more interesting going on than just being new. It had to be unique, or very nearly so. The redevelopment of a decrepit retail block? We're in. A mac-and-cheese box whose perforated, thumb-sized "open here" button actually worked? We'd like to talk to the inventor. A product that would keep one's shoes from coming untied during the course of a day? We'd be all over that. (Am I the only grownup who has trouble with her shoes? Even if I double-knot my Keens, they untie themselves in a matter of hours.)

Anyway, the point is that we had standards against running stories that amounted to unpaid infomercials. (That's one big reason why so many news releases end up in the trash: the hook is too weak. If there's no real news in your news release, it's going in the circular file.)

Sometimes it was someone from the sales department who would try to sell us on doing a story on his/her client's new something-or-other. Unfortunately for the client, the same rules applied: No hook, no story. And "cool new store in town that's going to buy a lot of advertising from us if you put it on the news" was, unfortunately, not a hook. Sorry/not sorry.

From news, I jumped into the simple living movement. And among that movement's tenets -- besides downsizing your life and reducing your footprint on the earth -- is keeping an eagle eye on your discretionary spending. Don't buy something just because your neighbor bought one; analyze your spending habits and stop buying stuff you don't need; buy the store brand if the quality's the same; kill your television; and so on. These things were pretty much second-nature to me, as my parents grew up in the Great Depression. And I never made a fabulous salary in radio, so I was doing a lot of them anyway, out of necessity.

Fast-forward to today: I've let up on simple living and I no longer work as a journalist. But I still have the sort of inquiring (all right, maybe cynical is a better word) mind that asks what's so new about this thing and do I really need to spend money on it.

And yet here I am, writing novels, which are pretty close to the top of the "stuff no one needs" pile, and asking complete strangers to take a flyer on them. Karma sucks.

Plus, to get my name out there so that people will know about my books, marketing is a necessary evil. But now I'm doing business with people whose messages I've spent decades resisting, and I am skeptical of all of them. Will Marketer X give me the return on my investment he/she claims? (Doubtful, in most cases.) How much is Marketer Y relying on me to get the word out about the promotion I'm paying him money for? (Crowdfunding sites, I'm looking at you.) Why does Marketer Z insist that I must use a particular blogging platform/book distributor/etc., even though other marketers argue for a different one? Whose pockets are being lined by all this advice, and how?

Last fall and winter, I put a fair amount of time and money into marketing, and didn't get much in return. There are a number of reasons why I've pulled back since then, the Denver saga being one of them. But I'm not planning a big push for any of my books this fall -- despite the fact that A Billion Gods and Goddesses will be out in the next week or so, and I expect to release a Pipe Woman's Legacy set for Kindle just before Thanksgiving.

Which is why I'm counting this blogging experiment as marketing. It's another avenue to get my name out there -- and a fairly unique one right now. And it's free.

Anybody else feel the same push-pull about marketing that I do, or am I the only one?

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These moments of skeptical blogginess have been brought to you (on multiple platforms!) , as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.