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Thanks to the genius of Charles Dickens, for the past 160-odd years there's been a killer label available to slap on anybody who demurs about full-out consumption at Christmas: Scrooge.
Nobody likes being called Scrooge. Scrooge is biting back, though. Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays by Joel Waldfogel may look like yet another laboured Christmas joke-book but it is nothing of the kind. Waldfogel is a serious economist, Ehrenkranz Professor and Chair of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
In a tough little volume, he argues that present-giving, as currently practised, is “a large and organised institution for value destruction”, no less.
The fact that his argument is formatted to look precisely like one of those dire Christmas gift books only makes it all the more telling. For these productions are, for all who really love books, not just value destroyers but an annual insult. This year, once again, the publishers have been bombarding the bookshops with daft titles intended to catch the eye of the disorientated present-buyer. They don't give up because they remember that, in years past, there have always been one or two that, for no obvious reason, suddenly became Christmas bestsellers on a scale that permanently transformed the fortunes of all involved.
There was Schott's Miscellany and Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoot & Leaves. There was Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? There were Bunny Suicides, Crap Towns and Does Anything Eat Wasps? Nobody knows what made them into such moneyspinners, so nobody knows how to emulate their success. So they chuck hundreds of imitations into the bookshops each autumn and keep their fingers crossed.
This year there are cod nostalgia books, either genuine reprints from the Forties or laboured recreations of them, trailing behind The Dangerous Book for Boys. There are violent cartoons about sweet animals, in dim homage to those suicidal bunnies. There are pedantry prompts, listing “the 100 words that makes us English”, or revealing “little secrets airbrushed from history” and “scientific surprises”. There's “101 Exceptional Excuses for Terrible Timekeeping”, anthologies of “remarkably rude but real names”, “words of wisdom from the golden age of agony aunts”.
Possibly not a single person in his right mind has ever bought one of these books to read himself. Most, indeed, are never read at all, save in a muzzy half hour after Christmas dinner. They are not, in that sense, books at all, merely painfully over-extended greetings cards or cracker mottoes. Christmas is traditionally a time for giving and receiving tat of all kinds — from perfumes that would fell an ox to jumpers modelled on the shirt of Nessus — but there's still something particularly galling about books being so traduced. They're the epitome of waste.
So the news that they're not selling well this year is welcome. In the book trade, says Jon Howells of Waterstone's, it's turning out to be a Christmas of old faithfuls — Delia, The Guinness Book of Records, Dan Brown and the like. A conservative Christmas: “People are sticking to things they know and that the people they are given to will like.” Even if that includes Jeremy Clarkson and Stephenie Meyer, it still means that books are being bought to be read.
And lurking among all the small-format tosh piled up around the cash register there's Professor Waldfogel, a most subversive infiltrator. This is a book I've been waiting for, one that carefully lays out the hard facts about the wastage involved in the orgy of present-buying.
Recipients of presents steadily value them at considerably less than they have cost the givers, surveys reveal. We can hardly be surprised. When other people choose our shopping for us, it's unlikely they'll choose it as well as we would have done ourselves. “Dollars on gifts for you produce 18 per cent less satisfaction, per dollar, than dollars you spend on yourself,” Waldfogel calculates. I'm surprised the figure is so small. But all of that difference is “deadweight loss”, he says, meaning it benefits nobody at all. He has determined that Christmas in the States results in “about $12 billion in actual US value destruction per year” —and he thinks we should be outraged.
Waldfogel is particularly indignant that so much of Christmas spending is now on credit. “Christmas arrives on December 25 every year. It's fully anticipated by even dimly sentient beings,” he scoffs. So why are people not better prepared? “Much of the use of credit by consumers at Christmas arises simply because, in short, they're as dumb as a box of hammers.” An academic term, I dare say.
Yet he is not an out-and-out killjoy: “My beef is not with the level of spending and consumption at Christmas but rather with the waste this spending generates.” Sometimes, presents really can be better than cash and actually add value, he acknowledges — if the giver knows the recipient really well.
But on average, Americans give 23 presents each, making such a successful present unlikely for most recipients. So Waldfogel proposes some less wasteful ways of giving, including just giving cash, wherever there's no stigma attached to it, and using gift vouchers, dealing with the problem of the number that are never redeemed by having them revert to charity when they expire.
These may sound dull but at least they would spare us the humiliation lots of us face right now of helplessly resorting to generic Christmas presents, every one of them certain to destroy value, in Waldfogel's terms — and none more so than “quirky” Christmas books.
Scroogenomics, on the other hand, is well worth £6.95. Perhaps it can even rehabilitate the name of Scrooge himself a tad? “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, coveteous old sinner!” Now also a prof with a rational appreciation of exactly how daft and damaging all this present-swapping can be.
Reader views (3)
At last - likeminded adults speaking out against the nonsense that is Xmas. What a breath of fresh air. I gave it up 4 years ago and I wish more people would admit that they find it stressful and tiresome and haven't really enjoyed it since they discovered Father Xmas doesn't exist and Jesus was probably born in the autumn (if at all)! Just because westerners have been commemorating the 25th of December since about the year 336 or something,that doesn't mean it's compulsory! Sorry if I have a mind of my own but I don't see why I should give cards to people I see every day, buy presents I can't afford for people who don't need them, spend my time off work with relatives and be branded a 'scrooge' because I don't subscribe to this wasteful greedfest. If I want to buy someone a gift, I do it all through the year. I bet I wouldn't be picked on for shunning Xmas if I was a Quaker, Jehovah's Witness or a Muslim. Oh, and don't think that because I'm not taken in by all the hype (those chemist's ads remind me why I don't do office parties or secret santa)that makes me a grouch - I'm overjoyed that since the 21st the days are getting lighter - after all, that's the real reason we used to celebrate Yule ...
- Xa, Hornchurch, Essex, 23/12/2009 12:11
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Well, having decided to ditch Christmas about 30 years ago, I no longer succumb to the madness that surrounds it. Spending holidays abroad? Nope - far too expensive and far too much hassle, what with the annual threats of strike and "the wrong kind of snow". Presents? Scrap that, too - there's absolutely no requirement for that, seeing that everybody has everything already. So, merry Christmas, and I'll enjoy watching the weather report from the safety of my cosy couch, unhampered by unwanted presents.
- Paulina Smid, London, 22/12/2009 12:10
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You`re right - but that means they have to resist the pulling power of Twiggy, or ads like Boots` "here come the girls"...
Not gonna happen while they`ve got excess cash and credit cards, is it?
Have a Thrifty but Happy Exessmas and a debt free new year, everyone who deserves it - `cause, y`know what -We`re worth it!
- Darius, London, 22/12/2009 11:20
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