Valentine’s Day: A Festival of Love or a Giant Scam?

Breaking hearts, brains and bank accounts since at least the 14th century.

'Occupy Valentine’s Day’
This year, Americans are expected to set a record for Valentine’s Day spending: $27.4 billion, up 32 percent from last year’s $20.7 billion, which was also a record. That’s about $196 per celebrator (about $15 of which goes to friends and $12 to pets). If that seems like too much money to you, perhaps consider joining in the long tradition of anti-consumerist Valentine’s Day curmudgeonry. “There was a time when Valentine’s Day meant something. … We hate this modern degeneracy, this miscellaneous and business fashion,” The New York Daily Tribune wrote in 1847. “Now nobody makes more than a joke of it.”