Of Human Bondage

This weekend is a back-to-school tax free weekend which means that we can buy most of clothing items, computer and school supplies without having to pay a state sales tax. Which translates to a whooping discount of 6.75%. The stores are full of shoppers, the telephone lines for Lenovo computers are jammed, people are really trying to cram their back-to-school shopping into this weekend. Just think about it: if someone announced a once-in-a-year tthree-days-only 7% sale on everything, I don't think this would have caught anybody's attention. 6.75%? You've got to be kidding us! With the recent recession, we are used to having sales of 25%-50%-75%! And even those would probably not make us work our weekend plans around shopping. In fact, retailers know we are going to shop en masse on this weekend, so they are probably holding off on some drastic price reduction till after it. If we can wait two more weeks - and we CAN wait because the school does not start for a couple of more weeks - we could probably see much lower prices, and items would cost us less even though we would be paying a state sales tax. Yet we don't want to wait. We come to shop this weekend. This seems to defy common logic. So what is the matter here?

I think the reason for this is similar to why Russian drivers and passengers persistently break a federal Russian law on buckling up in a moving vehicle. They know they can be stopped and fined for the violation, so they ingeniously just swing the seat belt across their shoulders without actually buckling it - that way the police can't spot them as violators. There is no logic in their actions. The properly buckled seat belts can and do save lives, especially on crazy Russian roads (they say that a Russian calls a road the place where he is planning to ride), yet they are stubborn in not using them. You see, for Russians not wearing a seat belt is a matter of pride, of principle, of defiance, of standing up to the authority, of asserting their freedom from the state.

And I think for us shopping in large hordes on a tax-free holiday stands for the same. Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike, we do not like the government, and we enjoy the thought that the government is not going to get a cut, however small, of our pie at least once in a year.