The Christmas markets of Metro Manila are not for the fainthearted. The streets, usually crowded already with the high density of population, are extra packed with people doing their last-minute shopping for gifts. Unlike elsewhere where Christmas is a matter of adopting a foreign culture into a consumerist form, Catholic Philippines are religiously tied to the celebrations. And when it comes to Christmas, people simply let out. A taxi driver said it the best, "the Filipinos will be impoverished after the Christmas holidays."
Indeed, the street-side markets are filled to the brim with not just people, but fresh produce and manufactured knickknacks that are perfect for gifting to the little ones. The shopping malls, always essential in Filipino society as places of social gathering, have become battlegrounds for the best bargains over clothing and food. Restaurants cram in as many families as possible, often apologizing for running out of stock for certain dishes when even they cannot foresee the amount of people that have came in for their Christmas dinners.
Yet, at the end, this should not be taken as a usual sight. With the income that the average Filipino earn, such outright consumerist behaviors are not affordable and honestly, plainly irresponsible from a finance perspective. But as the taxi driver noted, the Filipinos will spend, no matter what are the subsequent consequences. This sort of behavior during holidays is not unique to Christmas. The Muslims do pretty much the same thing with Eid. For one day at least, they want to forget, forget their poverty, and just celebrate without money worries.
Part of such over-the-top celebrations has to do with the presence of such financial embarrassment. The greater the poverty, the bigger the celebrations. The more inadequate one would feel about one's own lot, one would expend more efforts to play the cover-up. The idea of burning so much cash on gifts to ever-so-briefly show off limited wealth does not have any positive long-lasting impact for anyone, aside from the small shop-owners, and more probably, the distributors of the same knickknacks for public (over-)consumption.
But against all of the dubiousness for which people spend their limited funds on one-time consumerist euphoria, there is one thing that is clear. It is that the limited consumption, accumulated across an archipelago of 100 million people, does indeed have some degree of economic contributions. Having seen the dangerous dependence of certain countries on foreign funds from individuals, the author is convinced that the excess Christmas spending, due to its periodic consistency year-on-year, gives the country certain independent economic leverage space.
Ultimately, the presence of massive Christmas retail cultures does benefit the local populace, even when they are impoverished aside from those few celebratory days. The need to bring in Christmas presents create the need to establish at least adequate supplier and retail networks on a nationwide scale, something that is thoroughly deficient in many developing countries. It allows the woefully inadequate infrastructure of the country to be molded in ways that will get stuff from point A to B consistently despite the clear difficulty in making it happen.
There are surely limitations. As the author found out painfully through personal experience, quantity does not guarantee quality. Questionable ingredients are used to cook up those big family-sized Christmas feasts, even at the most luxurious of the country's hotels. For those not used to it, like the author himself, it meant a post-Christmas period spent largely on the toilet seat. And if personal anecdotes are any indication, the author is definitely not the only one. In makeshift Christmas markets of the streets, there is understandably little oversight on quality control.
Perhaps there lies the difference between a developed retail environment and a developing one. A developing one would struggle to meet surges and peaks that are magnitudes of normal volumes (precisely because of concentrated spending during holidays). Taking on the surge is difficult enough that other elements of proper retail processes are simply ignored. It is only once the retail volumes become more spread out over the course of a year due to increased disposable incomes, that consistency in quality will catch up. Reducing that sense of embarrassment from poverty will be a big first step.
Indeed, the street-side markets are filled to the brim with not just people, but fresh produce and manufactured knickknacks that are perfect for gifting to the little ones. The shopping malls, always essential in Filipino society as places of social gathering, have become battlegrounds for the best bargains over clothing and food. Restaurants cram in as many families as possible, often apologizing for running out of stock for certain dishes when even they cannot foresee the amount of people that have came in for their Christmas dinners.
Yet, at the end, this should not be taken as a usual sight. With the income that the average Filipino earn, such outright consumerist behaviors are not affordable and honestly, plainly irresponsible from a finance perspective. But as the taxi driver noted, the Filipinos will spend, no matter what are the subsequent consequences. This sort of behavior during holidays is not unique to Christmas. The Muslims do pretty much the same thing with Eid. For one day at least, they want to forget, forget their poverty, and just celebrate without money worries.
Part of such over-the-top celebrations has to do with the presence of such financial embarrassment. The greater the poverty, the bigger the celebrations. The more inadequate one would feel about one's own lot, one would expend more efforts to play the cover-up. The idea of burning so much cash on gifts to ever-so-briefly show off limited wealth does not have any positive long-lasting impact for anyone, aside from the small shop-owners, and more probably, the distributors of the same knickknacks for public (over-)consumption.
But against all of the dubiousness for which people spend their limited funds on one-time consumerist euphoria, there is one thing that is clear. It is that the limited consumption, accumulated across an archipelago of 100 million people, does indeed have some degree of economic contributions. Having seen the dangerous dependence of certain countries on foreign funds from individuals, the author is convinced that the excess Christmas spending, due to its periodic consistency year-on-year, gives the country certain independent economic leverage space.
Ultimately, the presence of massive Christmas retail cultures does benefit the local populace, even when they are impoverished aside from those few celebratory days. The need to bring in Christmas presents create the need to establish at least adequate supplier and retail networks on a nationwide scale, something that is thoroughly deficient in many developing countries. It allows the woefully inadequate infrastructure of the country to be molded in ways that will get stuff from point A to B consistently despite the clear difficulty in making it happen.
There are surely limitations. As the author found out painfully through personal experience, quantity does not guarantee quality. Questionable ingredients are used to cook up those big family-sized Christmas feasts, even at the most luxurious of the country's hotels. For those not used to it, like the author himself, it meant a post-Christmas period spent largely on the toilet seat. And if personal anecdotes are any indication, the author is definitely not the only one. In makeshift Christmas markets of the streets, there is understandably little oversight on quality control.
Perhaps there lies the difference between a developed retail environment and a developing one. A developing one would struggle to meet surges and peaks that are magnitudes of normal volumes (precisely because of concentrated spending during holidays). Taking on the surge is difficult enough that other elements of proper retail processes are simply ignored. It is only once the retail volumes become more spread out over the course of a year due to increased disposable incomes, that consistency in quality will catch up. Reducing that sense of embarrassment from poverty will be a big first step.
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