Now is not the time to encourage people to start Christmas shopping

The “rule of six”, or whatever it is today, has opened the door for an early mention of the word “Christmas” because of the effect it’s obviously going to have on people’s plans.

So of course the retailers have steamed in with the cry of “shop early, shop now, don’t risk missing out! We need your help. We need your Christmas cash. It’s time to exercise your plastic pal who’s fun to spend with”.

I suppose the call could almost be justified were it to have come from those businesses still largely reliant on bricks and mortar stores, because many of them, most of them, are on their knees.

But no. It’s the online crew with the clarion call – the people who are already swimming in so much digital cash it must threaten to overload their servers.

“If you can spread out your shopping and do quite a lot of it in November, maybe even a bit of it now, then that would really help,” Andy Mulcahy, from the IMRG – the trade body for online retailers, told the BBC.

But wait. This isn’t (just) about greed. Mulcahy has an explanation. It’s about logistics. The challenge of getting stuff out on time given the sheer number of people who are shopping online, partly to avoid the knuckleheads who get shouty when asked to wear masks if they want to get into physical shops.

And sure, logistics have been an issue in the midst of the pandemic. It has put systems under stress, caused deliveries to take longer, thrown up a bunch of unanticipated challenges for the pointy heads to get their teeth into.

So does this mean they’re to get rid of the annual fright-fest known as Black Friday? If there’s anything that’s going to put the industry’s systems under strain it’s an event which had morphed into a monstrosity within days of its unrequested import from the US.

It’s since metastasised into the preceding week, and the weekend, and the first couple of days of the next week. An eight or nine day orgy of consumerism like this is about as appropriate in the current climate as inviting Taylor Swift to come over for a week-long residency of free shows at the O2, sans social distancing.

Of course not. There’s no way they’re going sit it out. Au contraire. The sites devoted to it have already started with their teasers. Apparently, the Philips Ambilight range is a hot tip for the top television deal, but keep an eye on Samsung’s 4K offerings and remember: this is a “great opportunity to find something at a great price”.

Systems aren’t creaking so much that Mulcahy’s members are feeling the need to dial back on promoting the thing, because even if they do start to look like they’re under strain, they know can always draft in a bunch of kids to do a run of 12-hour shifts until they hit the deck from sheer exhaustion if the virus doesn’t get them first.

It’s about as crass as you can get. It’s about as tasteful as one of those awful Miss Teen USA pageants put on by Donald Trump. The ones at which the man who got the US military to clear a path so he could hold a photo op with a bible at a Washington DC church used to, according to former contestants, barge into the changing rooms while they were getting dressed.

When the unemployment rate is doing its best impression of one of Elon Musk’s rockets, and even those workers not on short time with their wages covered by Rishi Sunak’s subsidies are anxiously zooming colleagues to catch up on the latest rumours, it’s hard to envisage a worse time to encourage people to start early on maxing their credit limits.

What’s that, you’re saying the economy needs it? Actually it doesn’t. It needs for us to produce more and consume less.

But Trump, and his supporters, and his mini-mes, are proof positive that we live in a post-shame society, so I suppose we can’t really blame Mulcahy and his members for chancing their arms when everyone else is at it too.

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