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consumerism
Beware Black Friday: Consumerism, Worker Exploitation, and Environmental Harm
From start to stop, the shopping stampede known as Black Friday exposes the deep failures of our economic system.
Nov 28, 2024
Black Friday, once just a day to kick off holiday shopping, has evolved into a global phenomenon of massive sales, frenzied spending, and record-breaking profits for corporations. But beneath the allure of door-buster deals lies a complex web of wealth inequality, labor exploitation, and environmental damage. This annual shopping spree is more than a rush for discounts—it reflects systemic issues in our economy and society.
The Pressure to Buy More
Retailers carefully orchestrate Black Friday sales to create a sense of urgency. Promotions like “limited-time offers” or “flash sales” are designed to trigger FOMO (fear of missing out), leading consumers to purchase items they often don’t need. According to a 2022 survey by the National Retail Federation, Americans spent over $9.12 billion online on Black Friday, a 2.3% increase from the previous year. Despite rising living costs, this cycle of compulsive consumption continues, fueled by psychological manipulation and relentless marketing.
This system benefits large corporations disproportionately. For instance, Amazon’s Black Friday sales accounted for 17% of total U.S. online shopping in 2022, reinforcing its dominance in retail. However, while corporations and shareholders celebrate record profits, consumers often feel trapped in debt. Total U.S. consumer credit card debt exceeded $1 trillion in 2023, a stark reminder of the financial strain induced by events like Black Friday.
The Hidden Cost of Low-Wage Workers
The people enabling these shopping extravaganzas—warehouse employees, retail workers, and delivery drivers—often face the most significant exploitation. Many of these jobs are low-wage, part-time, and seasonal, offering little stability.
• In Amazon warehouses, workers are pushed to their limits, with fulfillment centers reporting injury rates nearly twice the industry average.
On Black Friday, the situation worsens. Retail employees are forced to work long hours, often on Thanksgiving, sacrificing time with family. Meanwhile, the CEOs of major retailers see their earnings skyrocket.
For example, in 2022, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon earned $25.7 million, while the company’s median worker pay was just $27,136—a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 933:1.
This stark disparity highlights a broader trend: while worker productivity has increased by 61.8% since 1979, wages have grown by only 17.5%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Black Friday encapsulates this imbalance, as the wealthiest continue profiting from the labor and spending of those struggling to make ends meet.
The Big Winners: Corporations and Shareholders
Major corporations like Walmart, Amazon, and Target dominate Black Friday, consolidating their power over the retail market. In 2023 alone, Amazon’s global Black Friday sales surpassed $10 billion, bolstering the wealth of its largest shareholders, including founder Jeff Bezos.
• Bezos’s net worth grew by $14 billion during the 2023 holiday season, underscoring the widening wealth gap.
• Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of U.S. households control just 1% of the nation’s wealth, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2023 data.
Black Friday serves as a microcosm of this inequality. Consumers spend billions to fuel corporate profits, while low-wage workers and underpaid suppliers see little to no benefit.
Environmental Impact: The Cost of Overproduction
Black Friday’s environmental consequences are staggering. The demand for fast, cheap goods drives overproduction, resulting in waste, pollution, and resource depletion. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over 12 million tons of furniture and clothing are discarded annually in the U.S., much purchased during sales events like Black Friday.
The transportation of goods contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, in 2022, global shipping for Black Friday orders generated an estimated 6 million tons of CO₂, equivalent to the annual emissions of 1.2 million cars.
The problem is compounded by the “planned obsolescence” of many products, particularly electronics. Items like smartphones and TVs are replaced frequently due to new models and sales, leading to an e-waste crisis. The Global E-Waste Monitor reported that 57.4 million metric tons of electronic waste were discarded worldwide in 2021, with less than 20% adequately recycled.
Rethinking Black Friday
Black Friday exposes the cracks in our economic system: unchecked consumerism, wealth concentration, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation. Addressing these issues requires systemic change and individual action.
1. Buy Less, Buy Better: Support local businesses, invest in quality over quantity, and resist the pressure to buy unnecessary items. Adopting sustainable shopping habits can reduce waste and promote ethical consumption.
2. Advocate for Workers: Push for higher wages and better working conditions. Organizations like the Fight for $15 campaign continue to call for a living wage for retail and service workers.
3. Support Environmental Initiatives: Consider the environmental impact of your purchases. Look for brands prioritizing sustainable materials and ethical labor practices.
Black Friday should no longer be a day of exploitation and excess. Instead, let’s reimagine it as an opportunity to reflect on our values and work toward a fairer, more sustainable future where people and the planet take precedence over profits.
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Estimated 400,000 People in US Suffering Under 'Modern Slavery'
"This is a truly staggering statistic and demonstrates just how substantial this issue is globally."
Jul 20, 2018
While the nation's richest and most powerful continue to enjoy the unparalleled fruits of a "New Guilded Age"--including those who have "yachts that have tiny yachts inside" them--a new report reveals that an estimated 400,000 people living in the United States live under forced servitude characterized as nothing less than "modern slavery."
According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, published annually by the Walk Free Foundation, there are over 40 million people worldwide living under such conditions, including "one in every 800" Americans.
"The United States is one of the most advanced countries in the world yet has more than 400,000 modern slaves working under forced labor conditions," said Andrew Forrest, founder of the Walk Free Foundation. "This is a truly staggering statistic and demonstrates just how substantial this issue is globally."
According to the report, the U.S. not only has an enormous population of people working under slave-like conditions, it's an insatiable culture of consumerism is also one of the premiere drivers of a global economy that fuels the exploitation and enslavement of workers worldwide:
Globally, imports were a key driver of modern slavery, with the United States as the biggest purchaser of goods at-risk of being produced through forced labor, importing more than $144 billion 1 a year. U. S. consumer demand was key to fueling this supply, with electronics (laptops, computers, mobile phones), garments, fish , cocoa and timber the highest value categories of imported items. The U. S. total is three times that of the second-largest G20 importer, Japan ($47bn), and nearly ten times more than its neighbor Canada ($15bn).
This reality of the global crisis, added Forrest, "is only possible through a tolerance of exploitation, demonstrated by the billions of at risk goods being brought to the United States to fuel consumer demand for affordable products."
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Pope's Climate Letter is a Radical Attack on the Logic of the Market
What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn't just his call to urgently tackle climate change. It's the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.
Jun 18, 2015
What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn't just his call to urgently tackle climate change. It's the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.
While the Argentina-born pope is a very humble person whose vision is of a "poor church for the poor", he seems increasingly determined to play a central role on the world stage. Untainted by the realities of government and the greed of big business, he is perhaps the only major figure who can legitimately confront the world's economic and political elites in the way he has.
However his radical message potentially puts him on a confrontation course with global powerbrokers and leaders of national governments, international institutions and multinational corporations.
The backlash began even before the encyclical was officially published. US presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic, feels the pope should stay out of the climate debate, joining other Republicans, fossil fuel lobbyists and climate denier think-tanks in seeking to discredit Pope Francis's intervention.
What makes the pope so radical?
There a several meanings of the word "radical" that can be applied to the Pope and in particular his forthcoming encyclical.
First, radical can be understood as going back to the roots (from Latin radix, root). The majority of Catholics live in the Global South; in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Francis is the first pope from the Global South, and naming himself in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, "a man of poverty and peace who loved nature and animals", signalled to the world a commitment to going back to the roots of human existence.
The pope knows the plight of the majority world. Before he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a priest in the vast, poor neighborhoods, the villas miserias or slums, of Argentina's capital.
Improving the lives of slum dwellers and addressing climate change is, for Pope Francis, one and the same thing. Both require tackling the structural, root causes of inequality, injustice, poverty and environmental degradation.
For example, his encyclical says:
Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drink- able water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. (p. 23)
This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestle, the world's largest food and bottled water company, who thinks water is a normal commodity with a market value, and not a human right. Nestle is far from unusual. Its stance is backed up by the official water privatization policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international institutions.
In fact, the encyclical is a radical - for a pope and international leader, unprecedented - attack on the logic of the market and consumerism, which has been expanded into all spheres of life.
The document states:
Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism ... leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. (p. 149-150)
The pope rejects market fundamentalism, instead arguing that "the market alone does not ensure human development and social inclusion."
In the same way, he warns us of the brave new world of carbon markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN's Clean Development Mechanism, which have been created to reduce the world's carbon emissions.
The encyclical states:
The strategy of buying and selling "carbon credits" can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors. (p. 126)
The pope's right. The same criticisms of carbon markets have been made by myself and others.
Will he make any difference?
Pope Francis has already angered conservative Catholics in the US by clearly stating that:
Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. (p. 20)
While the pope is not a politician - or maybe precisely because he is not one - he commands high moral and ethical authority that goes beyond traditional partisan lines. His encyclical speaks truth to power, and he might be the only person with both the clout and the desire to meaningfully deliver a message like this:
Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption. There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy. (p. 21)
The bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies will not like this message, as it threatens their fundamental business model, and it also stands in contrast to the underwhelming ambitions of the G7 leaders who recently pledged to phase out fossil fuels only by 2100.
The time for bold, radical action on the environment as well as poverty eradication has come. This seems to be Pope Francis' message: "The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty." (p. 128)
We need to think beyond the current, taken-for-granted logic that believes only markets and consumerism can solve the world's social and environmental problems. The pope himself believes the situation is so grave that only a new, "true world political authority" will be able to address these problems.
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