I had attempted to shop on three occasions during the prior week, but could not muster the will to enter a single store. I have a phobia of shopping that I have considered irrational until recently, but experiencing the extended trading hours and ridiculous sales that swallow up the festive season has put me at peace with my affliction.

Some might argue that extended trading hours are better for the Christmas Shopper; there is more time for the time-poor' to get their shopping done. However it is really just a safety net for the disorganised. In the same way that mobile phones have allowed us to treat punctuality with contempt, extended trading hours allow us to defer the inevitable. They do not help complete the act more efficiently or faster, but only delay it. As a consequence most shoppers in the store on Christmas Eve are disorganised or retail phobic, like me. They herd onto escalators, alight on the wrong floor, trip over plastic pot-plants, bumble into racks of clothes, and drift aimlessly amongst shelves of Manchester looking for that special gift. But how can such a haphazard method produce anything special?

The casualty of extended trading hours is The Thought, and as everybody knows, it is the only thing that counts on Christmas Day. Last minute shopping does not encourage thoughtful gift buying, but promotes reckless purchases likely to be received behind a false smile and pleasant "Thank You" usually reserved for gifts given by out-of-touch relatives. It is likely that the most popular sizes, the most fashionable colours and designs, the latest models, and the newest releases will be sold out well before the last minute rush, leaving the late shopper to scrape together anything that they can. To overcome this requires a nimble mind and several contingency strategies, skills that the disorganised and retail phobic do not possess, leading to ill-considered and thoughtless purchases.

In a world of deregulated shopping hours, the consumer acts on his own terms, which may be an advantage for those with extraordinarily demanding work or family commitments prior to the holidays. But is it necessary to open stores for 36 hours straight in the final days before Christmas? Is this the price we must pay for progress? How can a 3 a.m. spree on the night before the night before Christmas be necessary? "Please Santa, Can you bring me a new circadian rhythm?"

And what do you make of the 'Annual Tradition' of the post-Christmas sales? How this came to be a tradition that we should accept and live with I will never know. I am glad that the State Government made the wise decision to prevent trading on Christmas Day and Boxing Day to at least give us a few moments respite from retail madness.

It is not uncommon for stores to discount items by up to 50% during post'Christmas sales. How can they afford to do this? I understand that it is important for stores to clear out excess stock of products that haven't sold as well as predicted in order to make way for new lines. But what we must understand is that retailers support discounting after Christmas by increasing the price for the rest of the year. Whilst Mrs. Shrewdon-Thrifty is thinking she is about to get the deal of the year, elbow deep in a bargain bin hunting down a set of slightly soiled pillowslips, The Store Manager is laughing because in two weeks he can roll-out a new range of fresh unsoiled bedding and bump up the price handsomely. If customers did not buy the heavily discounted old stock just because it seemed cheap and made the retailer wear the loss, then the prices the rest of us pay for the rest of the year would be lower.

But it was an irresponsible marketing stunt that convinced me that being retail phobic was not at all unhealthy. One major Department Store offered special deals for the first 500 customers through the doors on December 27th. If newspaper reports at the time are true, over 2000 people queued up for several hours prior to the advertised store opening time in an attempt to secure vouchers for heavily discounted products, which were eventually thrown into the waiting crowd to be fought over by shoppers hungry for a bargain. This image of people selfishly diving and scrambling for that special deal became even more difficult to reconcile with any sense of decency in the days since when I saw a news report from Aceh. The footage from this report showed a rabble of Indonesian children and teenagers waiting for Aid Parcels being thrown from a hovering helicopter. These kids had lost their homes, or family and friends, and undoubtedly were in desperate need of food and medical supplies. It is perfectly excusable for them to dive over each other and scramble for the essential supplies to guarantee their immediate survival. It should never be excusable for Australians to squabble like seagulls over a chip, even if that means missing out on a $1 pair of Levis.