"I Forgot Christmas is about Maximising Profit" (Christmas and Commercialisation)

Member Name: Aspen

Product:	Christmas and Commercialisation
Date:	11/12/01 (113 review reads)
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I was resolved to write nothing about Christmas this year.

After all, it has been done to death, and though it is a great way of attracting a few extra reads, as a dooyoo topic, there are even more contributors who won’t read these things than there are who won’t write about them.


But since very few of you read the John o’Groat Journal, I felt the need to share something with you. Something which, I suspect, is replicated the country o’er in one form or another.


Take one northern town.

Take one northern town which is over two hours drive from the nearest main shopping place.

Take one northern town whose traders scratch a living by providing goods and services either for those who cannot do the four hour round trip to the city, or by providing goods which cannot be readily obtained by mail order.

Take one northern town, for whom the fun has gone out of Christmas (if indeed you subscribe to the view that there should be fun in Christmas. I do. That’s not to say I do not recognise or appreciate the religious significance of this festival, be its origins pagan or Christian. But only Wee Frees would deny us some fun at Christmas.)

Take one northern town, which is now divided.


Santa’s Grotto, organised by local charitable organisations, opened on Saturday 8th December. Traditionally, the town’s Christmas Fayre (how I hate that word, and even my spellchecker doesn’t like it much), organised by local traders, coincided with the opening of Santa’s Grotto, and a Big Fun Day was had by all.

Except that this year, the traders wanted the Fun Day on the 1st December, ie the first Saturday after November.

Why?

Because the biggest local employer, the notorious Dounreay atomic energy/reprocessing/whatever-you-believe plant, paid its employees on the 30th of November. And the local traders reckoned that if they left t
he Fun Day until the 8th of December, the “pay cheques will have gone to Inverness”.

And in the midst of this furore, we had the same Traders Association lobbying the local authority about “unfair competition”.

It appears that Charity Shops in the town are benefiting from subsidised Business Rates, which gives them an unfair advantage over “bona fide” traders. On the front page of the local paper, the local branch of Imperial Cancer Research gets most of the stick.


It’s a difficult one to call, isn’t it?

I mean, the knee jerk reaction of most of us is to condemn the commercialisation of Christmas.

But for some small businesses, the difference between survival and demise can be the difference between a good Christmas and a bad one. We’re not talking about the nationals and multi-nationals here – we’re talking about the little people like you and me.


This is not so much an opinion, more a question.

Let me end with a press quote.

“ ‘I forgot Christmas is about maximising profit’ says Traders’ disgruntled chairman.”




© Mike Clark 2001.

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