Not Buying Into Shopping's Big Day

As Others Spend, Spend, Spend, Anti-Consumers Keep Their Wallets Closed

Burt Fishman of Bethesda exercised his abs, not his credit card, on what is commonly regarded as a kickoff for the holiday retail season. (Photos Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

To most weary shoppers, it's the semiofficial start of the holiday retail season. But to hundreds of regional residents and countless others worldwide, the Friday after Thanksgiving is annual Buy Nothing Day.

They're out there, all right. They're just not standing in line.

They're holed up in a Tenleytown coffee shop, completing an astronomy project. Or staked out in front of a luxury store, waving a grisly placard at anyone in the market for a fur. They're working out, not checking out, in a Chevy Chase mall, and drinking in a Crystal City bodega, repulsed even by their own consumerism. Anti-shoppers all, they rebel against ritual.

"I don't like that you are supposed to go shopping today," said Mercedes Lopez, 31. An astronomy fellow at the Carnegie Institution, she spent yesterday in a corner of the Tenleytown Starbucks with her laptop, crunching three years' worth of data on star eclipses. "I'm a geek, I'm sorry," she said. "But every free minute I have, I'm working on this. The character of the stars helps determine the character of planets."

Buy Nothing Day is a 13-year-old observance in the same vein as tree-hugging or World Bank-bashing, though not as widely known, because its organizers hate advertising, too. Promulgated by the Internet and word of mouth, Buy Nothing Day is a non-acquired taste.

The Web site, www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/, features a Santa in the lotus position and reads:

"For 24 hours, millions of people around the world do not participate -- in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that's become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say to Exxon, Nike, Coke and the rest: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course."

Throughout the world, the site says, anti-shoppers observed the day: with blank billboards in New Zealand, a food-court potluck in Canada and a dumpster-diving tour in New York.

Buy Nothing Day coincides each year with Fur Free Friday, giving Tom and Cheryl Kucsera of Silver Spring a chance to buy nothing and scare those who might buy fur.

"We don't spend a cent on the day after Thanksgiving," said Cheryl Kucsera, 45, who joined about 75 people in front of Neiman Marcus in Chevy Chase D.C., holding a placard with a larger-than-life-size photo of the couple's pet rabbit, Max. On the reverse side was a picture of a skinned rabbit carcass.