As promised, the United Elves Guild took their strike to the streets of San Francisco’s shopping district on Black Friday. They marched onto Powell and Market to find a veritable throng of television, print, and radio journalists waiting from them. It seemed like the media was happy to have a new twist to tack on at the end of the same, tired “look at people shopping” stories they’ve been recycling for years. For pictures of the the elves in action, see Steve Rhodes and Shellac Fanatic. Here’s a video montage of the elves doing their thing.

It was fun watching people react to the elves’ carols and chants. The typical reaction when you see a bunch of adults in elves costumes is to smile. But when those full-sized elves are chanting things like “On strike, shut it down, the North Pole is a union town,” it creates some cognitive dissonance. People would walk by with confused looks that seemed to say “why are the elves angry”? That is, the people who were paying attention. A disturbing number of people on the streets had those depressing blank expressions you see on people at the mall or the DMV or playing slot machines. And lord, were there a lot of people out there. Throngs of people grimly walking from store to store.Props to the elves for wading into that mass of consumerist humanity and opening a few eyes to the possibilities of Buy Nothing Day. And big props to Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping for inspiring the Elf Strike. If you buy only one shopping-reduction movie ticket this holiday season, make sure it’s for What Would Jesus Buy, now playing at the Lumiere. And check out the cerebral, poetic side of Reverend Billy in this SFist interview and in the videos in our previous post.