Just as so-called Black Friday exists to get the attention of the public and stir it to action, so too was the protest disrupting business-as-usual along Michigan Avenue on the supposed kickoff to the post-Thanksgiving holiday sales season.
There were discounts and the discounted, and it will be hard to know how effective either was. The full accounting can take a while.
Commerce was threatened briefly Friday but not thwarted in the steady drizzle by demonstrators under dark gray skies and a significant police presence.
The tradition of Black Friday speaks to how easy it is to make a big splash, at least figuratively.
The reality of it is that it’s very hard to maintain that rush, wearing down people’s resistance with relentlessness without wearing them out with redundancy.
The marchers who organized in response to video of the fatal 2014 police shooting of African-American teen Laquan McDonald inconvenienced merchants and discount-seeking shoppers, whom they briefly may have kept in or from stores.
Traffic was blocked off temporarily by police. Tourists seemed confused, unsure of why this was going on.
Tough to say how many locals decided it would be easier to be somewhere quieter or at least drier, and tougher still to know how many simply have grown bored with Black Friday altogether.
Long-term success, whether in profitability or persuasion, is less likely to be found in flurries of heated activity than sustained engagement.
Businesses have come to rely on whipping holiday shoppers into a frenzy to achieve fourth-quarter goals and, by extension, annual performance.
But it’s so much more challenging than it used to be. Black Friday can no longer be counted on to be the jump-start it once was.
Though still much-hyped, the event has lost much of its urgency and power.
Consumers online and in bricks-and-mortar outlets look to pounce on deep discounts year-round and expect a flood of them come Christmas. Yet not every item can be a loss-leader.
There are a number of ways for merchants to compete, and price is just one.
A bricks-and-mortar operation that relies on discounts alone to compete with online sellers that don’t have the same overhead had to prove a futile proposition in the end.
If service, expertise, ambience and other considerations are to be part of the appeal, that’s an everyday sales pitch, not just the last few weeks of the year.
So live by Black Friday, perish by it as well.
Chicago’s protesters seeking social change and public reform would do well to bear that in mind too.
Having gummed up Michigan Avenue for a bit, what comes next? When? Where? More of the same and people numb out.
The seeds of the demonstrators’ long-simmering outrage, most recently roiled by the long-delayed video of McDonald being shot 16 times, are decades old. Things periodically flare up. Lasting change has been elusive.
Getting energized in short bursts has its value. Yet if a single day is seen as make or break, it’s broken.
Critical to both moving product and moving society is to not stop pushing, to always be closing.
Margin call: It was 240 years ago Sunday that the Second Continental Congress created the Committee of Correspondence. Soon renamed the Committee of Secret Correspondence and later the Committee of Foreign Affairs, it was responsible for such covert activities as establishment of an overseas spy network in anticipation of war with England. You might call it a patriot act.
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
