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Gotta shop? Bag it for a day, some say

By KRISTIN DIZON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is known in the retail industry as "Black Friday," a day when cash registers hum and sing.

For the past decade, a group of countercultural "burned-out lefties" have been trying to change that to "Buy Nothing Day."

On a day known for holiday sales and shoppers jostling each other for the best bargains, the folks at Adbusters Media Foundation hope you'll tuck your wallet away and abstain.

Seattle resident Michelle Stockton, 30, says she plans to participate in Buy Nothing Day for the third year in a row. She usually posts fliers about it around town and sends an e-mail to her close friends and family, asking them to not shop.

All of them agreed to, though one friend was bummed to miss the sales.

"I just think that there's a lot of unnecessary consuming and it causes a lot of problems," says Stockton, who works for online retailer Amazon.com.

Sure, she shops and occasionally buys something at a major retailer such as The Gap, but mostly she tries to support small businesses and recycle things through consignment stores.

"I try not to push it on anyone I don't know, because I don't think that gets results," says Stockton, who adds that it's about moderation, not extremism.

Kalle Lasn, editor-in-chief of Vancouver, B.C.-based Adbusters magazine, says it's time to re-examine our materialistic, consumer society. And he says Buy Nothing Day is part of that effort.

"More and more, our culture was being fed to us top down by ad agencies and TV sets," Lasn says.

He remembers the early days in 1992 when BND started out small in the Pacific Northwest, announced only to Adbusters' then 7,000 subscribers. A few people pulled pranks in malls.

"Suddenly, we found that as soon as we put it on the Internet, it happened in the United Kingdom and cities in Australia," Lasn says. "It grew by leaps and bounds."

Now, he estimates that about 100,000 people worldwide participate directly, putting up fliers, chopping up credit cards, "mock" shopping in front of stores, and more. But he thinks tens of millions hear about the concept.