The economic fallacies of Black Friday: 2015 Edition
The NRF estimates that total sales for the holiday season will be $630.5 billion, up from $608.0 billion in 2014. This would be an annual increase of 3.7 percent. This year, the NRF also estimates that retailers will hire between 700,000 and 750,000 seasonal employees, compared with the actual 714,000 they hired during the 2014 holiday season. On the surface, this may appear to be a marvelous celebration of free market capitalism. But let us look deeper through the lenses of the broken window fallacy and the idea of malinvestment.
To view holiday shopping as a boost to the economy ignores the fact that people could either be spending that money in other ways or saving it. In other words, such an approach is an example of the broken window fallacy because it focuses only on what is seen and ignores opportunity costs. If people would save their money rather than spending it on various holiday gifts, then this money would be invested in one thing or another. As Henry Hazlitt explains in Chapter 23 of Economics in One Lesson, saving is really just another form of spending, and one that has a greater tendency to allocate resources where they are most needed.
Per capita spending is predicted to be $805.65 in 2015, marginally higher than the actual $802.45 in 2014. The above problems get even worse if people use credit cards to spend money that they do not currently have. With a current credit card interest rate of 15.71 percent and a minimum payment of 4.0 percent, a debt of $805.65 would take almost five years to pay off and would cost $1,097.40. This is almost $300 wasted on interest payments that could have been kept in one’s accounts or put toward a productive purpose. Multiply this by the number of shoppers predicted, and the result is that as much as $39.6 billion could be spent on interest payments.
When people purchase unwanted gifts and/or buy gifts with money they do not currently have, their choices encourage malinvestments. A malinvestment is an investment in a line of production that is mistaken in terms of the real demands of the economy, which leads to wasted capital and economic losses. The holiday shopping season contains a subset of shopping which creates systematic and widespread mistakes in investment and production. Although the effect is not as severe as what occurs during an Austrian business cycle bust and is both caused and resolved in fundamentally different ways, there is a noticeable hangover effect on the economy. A look at the average monthly returns on the Standard and Poor’s 500 shows that while the worst month for investments is September, the next three worst months for investing are February, May, and March. (April would likely be bad as well if not for income tax returns providing an artificial economic boost.) An economic downturn occurs in the historical average following the holiday season, but as this has become an expected annual occurrence, many analysts simply do not look for an explanation of these results, as they are perceived to be natural. Even so, this appears to be a small-scale business cycle that repeats annually.
With these arguments in mind, would we all be better off if we just canceled the holiday shopping season? It is an open question, but the Austrian School of economics suggests that we could have a better economy if the burst of economic activity in late November and December were spread throughout the year and people did not spend money they do not have on items they do not need.
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