If the multitudes that arrived in midtown Manhattan last Friday – the post-Thanksgiving start to the US holiday shopping season – had resigned themselves to a Broadway darkened by striking stagehands, there was some amusement to discover that the stagehands weren’t the only strikers in New York.

Outside the Disney Store on Fifth Avenue 35 bellicose elves were chanting, “Silent night, we’re on strike: no outsourced toys for little tykes”, while a red-robed choir sang, “Stop, stop shopping”. In the midst of this chaos stood a white tuxedoed preacher bellowing into a bullhorn: a “shopocalypse” was coming, the Reverend Billy warned baffled shoppers – “the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!”