Is mass consumerism contagious?

[missroserose]

So here I am, comfortably ensconced in the bedclothes, luxuriating in my morning-after-Thanksgiving laziness, perfectly content to lie here reading Dickens and digesting and let everyone else hunt down the Black Friday doorbuster sales.

And suddenly I have the strongest urge to go down to the mall and buy that beautiful leather-bound edition of seven of Jane Austen's novels that I was coveting at the bookseller's the other day, despite the fact that [a] I have plenty to read already, [b] I'm not exactly in a financial position to be making a lot of frivolous purchases, and [c] there's no earthly reason why I should want to go right now, when the likelihood of being buffeted (and perhaps even trodden upon) by the great tide of bargain-crazed humanity is at its peak for the entire year.

Perhaps there really is something to the "herd instinct" theory of human behavior...