These two expressions - Sale and Savings - keep
pursuing and enticing you, like the mythical Siren
song, as long as you are on the American soil. The
pursuit becomes more aggressive and overwhelming
in December every year because of the festive season
of Christmas and New Year and the well-entrenched
tradition of exchange of gifts.
Last weekend I visited a swap meet, called scornfully
a ‘flea market’ because of the used
clothes sold there are believed to serve as havens
for fleas. I had never seen such a rush of people
in that place. Mr. Bush might attribute it to the
success of his tax return policy; but it does not
need a cynic to point out that bulk of the crowd
there fell in the non-tax-paying category. They
might have benefited though from the ripple effect;
but, the chief reason for their rush to the market
was undoubtedly the proximity of the holiday season.
You open the morning newspaper to find page after
page advertising sales of a plethora of gift items
from a highly expensive wristwatch fit for a feudal
potentate of Pakistan to a box of fancy toothpicks
within the reach of even a toothless mendicant.
You open your mailbox to discover the much-awaited
letter from a friend buried somewhere in the dollop
of sleek and shiny ad sheets, generally referred
to as ‘junk mail’. Since the flow of
such mail does not recede, it can be safely surmised
that a percentage of the recipients must be falling
for its Siren songs.
There is no period of the year free of the sales
pitch. You keep hearing about the pre-season sale,
the mid-season sale, the post-season sale, the clearance
sale, the blow-out sale, the liquidation sale, saleberation
sale, the Christmas and New Year sale, President’s
Day sale, Columbus Day sale, Father’s Day
sale, Mother’s Day sale and so on.
I haven’t seen, though, a Mother-in-Law’s
Day sale. The only ad about her that I had seen
decades back was: “Wanted: Sofa-bed. Need
not be comfortable. Mother-in-law is expected.”
You tune in to any radio or TV station and within
minutes you will be subjected to an array of advertisements
pressuring you to leave aside everything else and
make a bee-line to the advertiser’s shop to
take advantage of the bargains offered; or, just
give your credit card number for a delivery to your
door. How considerate of the Merchants of Venice!
Everything is on sale and at the lowest price. Even
a haircut can be found on sale. Every set-up claims:
‘No one can beat our low prices’. All
you have to do is to turn a few pages of the same
Yellow Pages to find someone else advertising similar
items at lower prices.
SALE signs keep alluring you from all directions
no matter which way you go. Even on electric poles
you will notice hand-written signs saying GARAGE
SALE, YARD SALE. If you have just arrived in this
country, you would naturally wonder how could a
garage or a yard be put on sale. You discover soon
that the household junk is placed in the garage
or yard for sale.
There is a breed of loonies who spend their weekends
grass-hopping from one ‘garage sale’
to another collecting items which attract their
fancy to be put on sale later on in their own garage
sale after their urge of possessing the items has
been satisfied. This is their hobby and like any
other hobby what really counts is the pleasure they
seek through it and not profit. The thrill of acquisition
compensates for the disappointing bottom line of
the deal. Of course, it is much more innocuous than
the hobby of hitting the bottle or of swinging from
bed to bed.
The other _expression one is constantly fed on is
“SAVINGS”. There is so much of emphasis
on this word – saving - in this country that
it is invariably used in the plural form. It is
like the solitary Sardarji (Sikh) being referred
to as Faujan (armies) in our part of the world.
No matter what you buy here, you are always saving
some amount. Whether you are lavish or frugal, you
keep saving as you spend. When you turn around to
take stock of how much you have saved, you find
that your pocket has shrunk further. You might even
be owing money to the bank which had issued to you
the credit card. Bulk of the Americans and many
copycat South Asians nurture credit card debts throughout
their lives. That is the beauty and essence of the
concept of saving, or ‘savings’ if you
prefer, in this land of plenty.
A colleague was returning to his country at the
end of a three-year tenure in New York. When asked
how much he had saved, he said : “At least
$50,000.”
“How did you manage that?” he was asked.
“Very simple”, he replied, “when
I bought a car, I saved $8,500; on the purchase
of a TV, I saved $2,500, and throughout my stay
here I have been, similarly, saving on each and
every purchase. By now my savings must have touched
$50,000.”
“But we don’t have more than 1,500 dollars
in our account”, his wife protested.
“That is the charm of the system. You spend
while thinking that you are saving.”
Another colleague was returning to Pakistan after
a four-year term in Ottawa. Helping him in the packing,
I noticed that he had collected at least 100 neckties.
“Why did you purchase so many ties when you
have only half a dozen suits?”
“I like good ties and when a $25 tie is put
on sale for $5 only, I couldn’t pass the opportunity.
But, now that you have mentioned it, I really wonder
how on earth I am ever going to wear them. I suppose
bulk of them I shall have to give away in gifts
to friends and relations back home”.
If you pause for a while and think about this system
of sales and savings, you gain some idea about the
operation of market economy in this country. And,
you may also begin to understand the occurrence
of recession after every so many years. If for some
reason the confidence of consumers is shaken in
the sources of their income or the market value
of their homes - most popular form of savings -
falls owing to supply exceeding demand or some other
reason, they become tight-fisted in their expenses
despite all the advertisement gimmicks. The consequent
sagging of demand sets in motion a ripple effect
in all sectors of the economy. Layoffs of employees,
cutting down of departments and of production targets
ensue. People suddenly realize that they have no
nest egg, no actual savings, to sustain them during
such a period.
When the economy is in recession, marketing mandarins
attribute it to the frugality of consumers, forgetting
the fact that most of them are left with little
disposable income.
Another interesting aspect of this game of sales
and savings is that you can sell anything in this
country provided you know how to. If you are a good
salesman, you can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo
or a transistor radio to Sony. On the other extreme
could be found an incorrigible optimist celebrating
the theft of his credit card as the thief was spending
less than his wife. He may be regarded as the most
sanguine and savvy saver in this game of sale and
savings.
Since saving is an imaginary exercise, some go on
a shopping spree in a matching exercise. Visits
to the beautiful shopping centers and malls are
turned by them into exciting sight-seeing tours.
That goes against the teachings of Lord Manard Keynes,
the father of the modern economic and financial
system. If you have been laid off - a common occurrence
these days - you would find added logic and compulsion
for defying his theory and the lures of all those
seductive siren songs.
Incidentally, the cure for the distortion is to
be sought internally. The economy cannot be set
right through an external adventure; it might even
start sinking under the weight of the adverse balance
of payments. As the famous Persian sage, Saadi,
has put it: “Taa tiryaq us Iraq avurda shavad
Mar gazida murda shaved” . Translation: Till
the anti-dote is secured from Iraq, the person bitten
by the snake would have breathed his last. The reference
to Iraq is incidental; do not please start exercising
your mind on the repercussions of the control on
Iraqi oil or the booting out of the Euro to rehabilitate
the Dollar.
Arifhussaini@hotmail.com
/ (714) 921-9634
