Sometime in the previous century, our country realized an immutable, unavoidable, fundamental truth: Thanksgiving kind of sucks.
Think about it. It’s all the shitty relatives and overeating of Christmas, with none of the free stuff. So this great nation decided to spice up Thanksgiving with the only low-minded appeal to rabid American materialism that could possibly rival free stuff: cheap stuff. And thus, Black Friday was born.
But against all odds, a holiday dedicated to sweaty soccer moms trampling people in the aisles of a Walmart for a $10 waffle iron wasn’t enough to elevate a food orgy spruced up with genocide imagery to the level of cultural icon. Americans needed something more.
Enter Cyber Monday: Black Friday for people who didn’t want to get up early or - God forbid - leave their houses.
It should have been the perfect American holiday. Rampant consumerism, sweetened with the promise of not paying market value for low-quality goods already produced too cheaply to be ethical. No obligation to interact with any living humans, and certainly not anyone you’re related to. No cooking, travelling, dressing up, or general energy expenditure.
But the perfect holiday, it turns out, does have one thing in common with mainstream American culture: It’s super. Fucking. Lame.
“I mean, you just...sit in front of a screen and buy shit,” said college student Chanel Potter. “I do that all the time anyway. Like, why is that a holiday?”
Potter’s classmate Jeremy Foo agrees.
“Objectively, Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday are even more forced,” he said. “But at least, they’re like, pretending to be altruistic or some shit. There’s a point. Cyber Monday is just...sad.”
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