Not only do I share your guess that the main effect of a buy-nothing day is to shift rather than remove purchasing, I can’t escape a cynical suspicion that the idea of a “Buy Nothing Day”, on a day when major retailers have particularly low prices, might originally have been seeded by those retailers in an attempt to get people to feel good about Not Contributing To Capitalism when what’s actually happening is that they buy the same things but at different times and hence at higher prices.
(I think that probably isn’t what happened. But I wouldn’t bet against it at 10:1 odds.)
Not only do I share your guess that the main effect of a buy-nothing day is to shift rather than remove purchasing, I can’t escape a cynical suspicion that the idea of a “Buy Nothing Day”, on a day when major retailers have particularly low prices, might originally have been seeded by those retailers in an attempt to get people to feel good about Not Contributing To Capitalism when what’s actually happening is that they buy the same things but at different times and hence at higher prices.
(I think that probably isn’t what happened. But I wouldn’t bet against it at 10:1 odds.)