The Buying Freeze: A Week Without Feeding the Beast

Tomorrow starts the national Buying Freeze, aka the Economic Blackout, from November 25th to December 2nd. The idea is simple: don’t shop at any major corporation for a week. No Target runs. No Amazon carts. If you absolutely need something, get it from a local business, and use cash. Otherwise, wait.

There was another freeze last February, but I was out of the country then, which technically means I participated without even trying. Any time I’m abroad, I’m automatically in an economic blackout, mostly because I’m thousands of miles away from American retail. But this time I’m in the United States, during the holidays. So the idea of not buying anything for a week feels especially significant.

Partly because this spending freeze overlaps Black Friday and Cyber Monday—the high holidays of American capitalism—and partly because I’m realizing how much my own habits have been shaped by living in other countries where people spend less and instead invest in community.

What the Buying Freeze Is About (and Not About)

On paper, the Buying Freeze is a protest against corporate behavior: price gouging, exploitation, obscene executive pay, the slow strangling of small businesses, and the total addiction to convenience that’s reshaped American life.

In practice, it’s about something simpler and much more psychological: interrupting our automatic purchasing behaviors that corporations depend on.

We buy because we’re stressed. We buy because we’re bored. We buy because the algorithm whispered a suggestion. We buy because Amazon has engineered a button that rewards the exact neural pathway that loneliness uses.

So for one week, we’re interrupting the loop. We’re pausing. We’re not feeding the beast.

My Personal Rules

Unless it’s medicine, food, an actual emergency, there will be no purchases.

And if I do go out for something necessary, then I’m going small: the local pharmacy, the independent café, a neighborhood shop.

Luckily (?) for me, I currently have a bad cold, perhaps a sinus infection, and feel like crap. So the idea of avoiding large fluorescent stores full of people is not exactly a hardship. But if I recover by the weekend, I might head to Passyunk Avenue in South Philly for Small Business Saturday, which is a nationwide push to get people to shop local. 

Passyunk Avenue is like an alternate universe that has retained the charm of what America was probably like before big business. It’s an entire street of small shops, local restaurants, and places that exist purely because someone loved an idea enough to open a door for it. There’s even a typewriter shop! Not vintage-themed. Not ironic. A real business where you can buy a typewriter or bring yours in if it’s having a mechanical crisis. And the surrounding neighborhood is equally as cute, full of the little rowhouses Philadelphia is known for.

Passyunk is doing their own holiday shopping weekend next week. No corporations. Just humans making things and selling them to other humans. That’s the point. That’s what this buying freeze is trying to push people back toward: remembering that life happens out in the world, not just in your browser history.