Billion Dollar Babies, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

December 28, 2013 Martha Thomases 2 Comments

If you’re reading this far, you survived the War on Christmas.  Get through the next week, and the holiday hostilities will cease until Easter.

And, by surviving, you are doing better than the average American retailer.

As I write this, there are not yet final numbers for retail sales over the holiday season.  However, the best estimates I’ve seen suggest that they aren’t great.  There are a lot of excuses,  including the fact that there were fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the traditional shopping season.  As someone who started hearing Christmas music in stores in September, I find this difficult to accept.  As this article says:

‘Other analysts also predicted that same-store sales would inch up 2 percent to 3 percent across the retail sector overall, with aggressive discounters and value brands faring the best. Across most income levels, shoppers responded to a still-slow economy, while the shorter holiday shopping season gave them less time to buy, Feinberg said.

“‘There’s still this overhang and people … hold their purse strings a little bit tighter,’ said Morningstar equity analyst Jaime Katz. She said retailers responded by lowering prices, if not across the board, at least on selected items. In these final days, ‘It seems like it’s escalating,’ she said. ‘To me, that would indicate holidays didn’t turn out as fruitful as maybe they had originally hoped.’”

Ya think?  While the amount of cash being exchanged among shoppers and retailers may be up, the deep discounts necessary to facilitate these transactions mean that profits will most likely be thin.  And not in a 2014 New Year’s resolution kind of way.

As with so many things, I blame the Republicans.  In this case, specifically, I blame their Social Darwinist, trickle-down economic policies.  I blame them for cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits.  I blame them for ripping big giant holes in the social safety net.

One of the holes in that safety net was big enough for the holiday shopping season to fall through.

I don’t have any proof at all for my theory other than personal observation, but here it is.  Even if we accept the idea that all the people using food stamps, unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicaid are lazy freeloaders (and I don’t) who deserve to die in the streets, hungry and alone, they aren’t the only people affected by these policies.  Yes, the person whose food stamp allotment is cut by $9.00 probably wasn’t going to buy many Christmas presents, but what about the person who owned the grocery store that accepted the food stamps?  That person isn’t being reimbursed for the food stamps now, and, most likely, has more than one customer on food stamps, neighborhood demographics being what they are.  That person’s income has now taken a hit, even though he’s one of those celebrated job creators.

The people who most need the government safety net are the people who put the largest share of their income back into the economy.  They have to — food and rent and clothing are the things we all buy first, before we can save or invest or buy me jewelry.  It is their spending that creates the revenue our billionaire business titans think is threatened by giving kids real food in school lunch programs.

For myself, I resent the pressure to give gifts at the end of the year, as if my relationships exist only to sustain the economy.  I don’t think it’s healthy for the economy or for our society to rely on people’s greed, insecurity and sense of obligation.  And I admit to a certain satisfaction that the people who create such a system are now the ones suffering from it.

Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that we have better days in 2014.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, resolves to throw the ball for her cat more in the New Year.