Why I’m spending $143 on Valentine’s Day - By Rick Newman

Nobody has a knack for turning a modest expression of affection into a spending orgy the way America does.

To cultivate love and romance (and, perhaps this year, bondage), Americans will spend about $19 billion on Valentine’s Day paraphernalia to express what mere words and gestures can’t: I love you! So here, pig out on chocolate! We do this to honor the ancient tradition of obeying marketers when they tell us to spend money.

This midwinter festival of love apparently dates to the imprisonment, torture and beheading of a Roman priest named Valentine in the third century. Isn’t that romantic? Valentine served under the emperor Claudius II, aka Claudius the Cruel, who banned marriage as a way of freeing young men from the clutches of women so they’d be easier to conscript into the army. Valentine found this appalling and performed marriages in secret, until the emperor busted him and had him executed on February 14, 270 A.D.

There are a few competing Valentine’s Day creation myths, including a pagan ritual called Lupercalia in which priests slaughtered some animals and cut strips of skin they handed out to young men. The men would then chase women to tap them with one of the skins, which would supposedly render the women fertile. What the tappers and tappees did after that didn't make it into the encyclopedia entry on the festival, but at any rate, in 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius consolidated various love festivals by declaring February 14 St. Valentine’s Day, trumping all other celebrations. Russell Stover stock rose 40% in one day.

For centuries, lovers celebrated Valentine’s Day by exchanging handwritten missives or small tokens of affection. Then, in the 1840s, an American businesswoman named Esther Howland ruined everything by mass-producing Valentine’s Day cards with pat, pre-printed messages, freeing people from coming up with their own thoughts. The trend caught fire, fueled by the rise of America’s mighty consumer class and the outsourcing of self-expression to wannabe novelists working for greeting-card companies.

Cards alone no longer represent a sufficient expression of devotion, of course, which is why consumers this year will spend more on jewelry than on anything else, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group founded by St. Valentine’s ancestors.

The next biggest spending category after jewelry is movies and restaurants, which is how the truly smitten spend their money, since anybody willing to spend twice as much as usual on a rushed restaurant meal hustled out by cranky, overworked waiters in a jam-packed steakhouse has truly some new pleasures proved.

The rest of this year’s Valentine’s haul will be spent on flowers, candy, clothing, pet treats and teacher bribes. The average person celebrating Valentine’s Day this year will spend $142, which is 6.3% more than last year, according to the NRF. Wages have only risen by about 2% during the last 12 months, so we’re spending more of our hard-earned pay expressing our love for each other and less on disagreeable stuff like gasoline. If the trend holds, eventually we’ll spend 80% or 90% of everything we earn on love, and the rest on Halloween.

The NRF, which is funded by the retail industry, helpfully tallies up spending per person so that if you’ve only picked up a fine wine or a bottle of perfume for your honey, you know exactly where you stand—about $100 short. The retail federation doesn't mean to get involved in your love life, but look--you need to spend more. And that $142 will merely make you a mediocre Valentinian, by the way. Since I consider myself above average, I’ll be spending at least $143 on love symbols this year. And I aspire to become a true loverachiever—one of those guys who spends $10,000 or more on a forest of flowers for his perfect mate, because she's worth it. Maybe I’ll have mine delivered by helicopter.

You might be thinking: Can’t we do something more “useful” with that $19 billion, such as eradicate Ebola, purchase enough food to feed 10 million refugees for 5 years, or send everyone in Boston to Florida until summer? Well, sure, if you want to be a buzzkill. You'll be allied with a small group of Japanese Marxists who plan to march in Tokyo on Valentine's Day to protest "oppressive chocolate capitalists," as they describe V.D. revelers on their Web site.

Most Japanese will ignore them as they practice passion capitalism, just as we Americans will undoubtedly support our own Valentine's Day economy. Merchants need that $19 billion, because transferring money from people’s bank accounts to retail cash registers is what keeps the U.S. economy humming. If you take on debt to finance your Valentine’s Day extravaganza, even better, because that will keep desperately needed money flowing to the beleaguered financial sector, which is “under assault” from loveless (and unloved) regulators.

One curious thing about Valentine’s Day: If you run through the NRF’s math, it takes about 133 million people spending $142 per person to rack up $19 billion in spending. But there are 245 million Americans over 18, which means 112 million heathens don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day at all, leaving it up to the rest of us to Keep Love Alive. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Culled from Yahoo Finance