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It seems that I am not the only one to comment on the subsuming of Thanksgiving into crass commercialism; Clare Zillman's 25 November 2013 Fortune article "How Black Friday Ate Thanksgiving" addresses the same issue.  In the piece, Zillman notes that "Thanksgiving is gone for good," citing the profitability of stores opening on the holiday and the fears of many retailers that they will lose sales to those stores open earlier than they.  She does this in addition to giving context for the "shopping holiday," tracing its use as an advertising slogan back through the 1990s and its use in reference to sales, generally, to the 1960s or 1970s.  Although depressing, the piece does effectively put across its points, revealing an unfortunate truth.

That Zillman makes her closing statement, quoting one source to assert that so long as sales are good on Thanksgiving, retailers will open for it, is unsurprising.  Matters are such that the acquisition of money is the prevailing cultural goal; money-making is firmly in the American zeitgeist as The Goal, and when a person's worth is discussed, it is in reference to net worth rather than moral or spiritual worth.  And I can understand why; monetary worth is calculable.  It is verifiable.  It is demonstrable.  It is something that can be quantified, and it is a truism that concrete ideas are easier for the mind to grasp than abstract.  People, myself included, are fundamentally lazy; we will do the least work possible to achieve a desired effect, whether that effect is to feel good about the amount of work we have done that day or to get food on the table and a roof over our heads.  Grasping easy ideas is concomitant with that laziness; it accounts in large part for the reduction of public debate to soundbites and the echo-chamber effect that social media have tended to provoke.  (How many deliberately keep Facebook friends whose opinions are divergent from your own?  How many do it because the opinions differ?  Milton's untested virtue comes to mind.)  And so we focus on the measures we can quantify--test scores, bank accounts--with the admittedly understandable effects thereof that those measures become the only ones that really matter.

The problem--of which the crassness of the Thanksgiving sale is but a symptom--is that reducing a person to measurable, quantifiable data is just that: a reduction.  It echoes too much the kind of system that allows slavery (whether so-called, labeled "indentured servitude," or under other names with which I am not familiar) to flourish; what else is it but the objectification of a person taken to its conclusion, the ultimate dehumanization of person-as-product, valuable only insofar as an embodiment of currency and the labor and goods which support it?  It denies the inner essence of personhood that has been recognized by populations among themselves for long but only recently and haltingly by them in others.  It undercuts what is still recognized as a great boon: service to others (something upon which all of us rely, whether we want to admit to it or not; we are fortunate that many are called to serve despite being poorly remunerated and told thereby that their service is not really as important as stump speeches say it is).  And it will work, in the end, to our ruin.