The Siren Song of Sale and Savings
By ArifHussaini
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. The President 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, 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: “Taatiryaq us Iraq avurdashavad Mar gazidamurda 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. Repeated.
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