Rogers, Nissan Lead in Christmas Crassness Sweepstakes

Oh, I like Christmas.  I’m lucky to live in a place where there’s often snow at Christmas, and I like the lights, the crowds, and so on.  Sure, the commercialism is soul-destroying, but for anyone with a long historical perspective, one knows that it was ever thus.  I see no point in fighting it.  I remember being a kid and wanting the newest toys.  What can you do?

Still though, this Christmas I notice a peculiar phenomenon, led by major marketers like the above-mentioned Nissan and Rogers.  Rogers has arguably been doing it for a few years.  What they are specifically doing is running ads saying “hey, buy something for yourself.”  Everywhere I go these days, marketers are saying: “buy a present for yourself.”

This does bespeak a new level of crassness.  Once upon a time, marketers did try to sell the old-timey peace-on-earth goodwill-to-all things as they got their ads going in November.  But now just about every ad seems to be NOT about buying something for someone else, but about buying for YOU.

Why?

Well, our selfishness and disconnectedness from others, even as we stare ever more deeply into our electronic devices—that’s obvious.

Or could it be something else.  Like most people, I used to shop at stores.  Now, as time goes by, I shop increasingly online.  When I used to go out to stores at Christmas, it was a weird, heady, different experience, and try as I might, I inevitably found things to buy for myself.  Now that I shop online, it’s much more targeted, with only the people I want to buy for imagined.  Oh, sure, the online marketers constantly try to make you buy for yourself, but maybe I’m just old or things have changed or whatever, but actually that doesn’t have much effect on me.  I tend to be a much more efficient shopper now, in the online world.  I know what I want for others, and I go out in search of it and buy it; there is little collateral commercial damage involving me.  Do TV and radio, and, I guess, online, marketers grasp this, and are they recalibrating to tell us to get gifts for ourselves accordingly?  I wonder.

Hey, I’m not anti-Christmas commercialism.  It just is what it is and has been for about 150 years.  But these new ads—everywhere—targeted almost exclusively at getting people to buy things for themselves—that *is* a new development. 

Well, Nissan and Rogers have really lost me.  They say in advertising, as in all other things, that all bad press is better than no press.  Fine.  But you can make a decision.  For example, my family pretty much only ever used Michelin tires.  They always did make good tires.  But then they came out with their ad campaign with babies in tires, suggesting that failure to buy Michelin meant that you were trying to kill your kids.  Well, bingo dingo, that was it.  Whereas I would have been the first person to buy Michelins for life, I now never will.  I’ve been buying tires for decades now, and whereas I would have bought many Michelin sets by now, I never have, and I never will.  I’m willing to pay more for inferior tires, just to not have Michelin.  So sometimes bad press is bad press.

Nissan, Rogers, all those other companies advocating buying for yourself above all before others, well.  I’m sure they’ll do fine as time goes by; Michelin sheds no tears over my non-patronage, I’m sure.  But I wonder.  I wonder if enough people just said: “Christ, this is enough.  This really is enough.”

Well, happy buying, anyway.  Yeah, buy something for yourself.  But if you really get more of a charge out of buying something for yourself than buying something for someone else, then maybe buy yourself a gun and put us all out of your selfish misery.

Update: November 2014: The Source is advocating that you buy for yourself first and has spent countless thousands on updating the Canadian Tire scrooge motif.

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