In retail a sale used to be an annual and special promotion. There used to be few if any pre-Christmas sales – that was traditionally a period of maximising turnover and maximum margins. Now sales are common right through the last months of the year.

For many outlets ‘sales’ now seems to be a weekly marketing tool – so much that unless you are desperate buying many things at non-sale price is foolish.

Rather than give people a break from sales after the commercially over-driven Christmas, an onslaught of post-Christmas sales has become the norm.

I saw ‘Boxing Day Sales’ being advertised on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. One large retailer advised that you could start shopping online for their Boxing Day Sale at 10:30 pm on Christmas Eve.

Boxing Day was full of sale mania – manic marketing and manic shopping.

It seems that it is now the biggest retail day of the year. That seems nuts to me. Christmas can be a very expensive time, so who would then want to load up the credit card even more or spend what’s left of their holiday pay? Many people, according to the ‘news’ (media outlets who benefit from the sales’ advertising give free promotions in a slow news period).

Sales are the new norm. Boxing Day sales will inevitably morph in to End of Year sales, then New Year sales, then marketing maniacs may have to get creative thinking of names for their promotions.

Shopping seems to have become an addiction, created and fed by retail chains. Many people seem to have become chained to over-commercialisation, and gross over-consumption. This adds to a lot of waste and rubbish and pollution.

Not everyone is afflicted. Many people will be on holiday (but some on holiday may simply have shifted their shopping addiction to a different location (albeit with largely the same retail chains).

I didn’t venture out at all yesterday, we had a family day at home. I did buy a lawnmower at a boxing day sale six years ago, but I don’t think I have indulged in post-Christmas wallet emptying since then.

Retail addiction has been given a euphemism – retail therapy. That’s a cynical and ironic description for a modern problem, trying to normalise the trashing of our planet as if we need and deserve it.

We will get what we deserve when we get sucked into sales we don’t need, to buy crap we don’t need, that adds pressure to our planet’s resources that it doesn’t need. Or if we manage to survive unscathed it will leave a burden for our children or grandchildren.

The retail spiral is out of control, with no sign of it abating. The population in general is addicted thanks to pervasive and calculated marketing messages.

Who needs a government to mind control their population when they can leave it to retail proxies? Of course the Government is complicit as they rake in the taxes. It has become a massive ponzi scheme, with no sign of a way of the ride to self destruction.