You may interpret that title to compare Christmas to the opposite of the game Monopoly. Instead of buying pieces of property to force other people to give you their money or property, everyone gives away pieces of property to force others to feel socially pressured into giving back either money or property. Instead of one person winning and everyone else losing in a long, drawn out deliberations, everyone pretty much breaks even in a long, drawn out mad rush.
Unfortunately all of that is nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself if you agreed with any of that poor analogy.
No, I'm talking about real monopolies, like if one guy owned all the shoe stores in the world. He decides to raise the price of shoes to $1000 a pair, and what are you going to do about it? HE'S GOT ALL THE SHOES. Another example is Parker Brothers' monopoly over monopoly-based board games (Decreasing the Number of Competitors to Increase Market Power will hopefully turn a profit soon).
Christmas is basically the reverse of that. I don't mean high levels of competition are saving everyone money. It's still a monopoly, we're just doing it to ourselves. We all plan, as a group, to all buy shoes at the same time, so that one guy doesn't even need to own all the shoe stores to charge us $1000 a pair. He just does it because we all need to buy shoes RIGHT NOW, and what are we going to do about it?
Seriously, I want to know. We've got to come up with a plan.
These shoes are three hundred dollars.
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