Black Friday shopping trumps voting ..

.. by a lot ! 138 million to 87 million ! That tells us something about what makes American's tick :)

I was in my car today listening about the craziness of Black Friday shopping on NPR and the host said something really interesting - "What if America was as enthusiastic about Voting as they are about shopping ?". Hmm, what if ...

To be fair, I don't blame the people who are excited about lining up outside the stores in 25 degree (-4 C) weather for a number of hours [and in some cases even days]! The amount of money you could save is HUGE. Infact, 3 years ago me and my wife did pull out an all-nighter in front of an OfficeDepot and I'm happy to say we were successful in getting at least one of the things we wanted :) I'm not that brave any more [although can't really say that about my wife, who was out in the mall today from 5am to 5pm :)] and prefer to sit in my home with the heat turned on. But, I did do my part to stimulate the economy by buying a couple of things online, which needless to say, I easily could have done without. That's the lure of not missing out on the mega-sale !

So how can we make voting as chic as Black Friday shopping. Well I don't know if that's ever going to happen but paying everyone a 100 bucks to come out and vote might just change the dynamics. I'm sure all the busy people would then somehow find the time to vote. Agreed, 20 billion is a lot to spend on an interesting experiment but its not like all the other things that were done to rack up a deficit of $1.5 Trillion were a lot more useful than this.