Long long ago, there was a time before internet shopping when things were different. Shops would have a bonanza time selling stuff in the leadup to Christmas. We’d all have fun opening our presents on Christmas Day and being festive and all that. Then the shops would open on Boxing Day and people would get up really early in the morning to queue for bargains, and the news would report on how long the queues were.
Meanwhile, in America, Thanksgiving was the main festive event. People would buy gifts to give each other for Thanksgiving. Similarly to our Boxing Day sales, there would be sales after Thanksgiving. Here we have Black Eye Friday, the Friday before Christmas when businesses close early and the chaps spend the afternoon in the pub then decide to round the evening off thumping one another. So the term Black Friday was used by the Philadelphia Police to describe the chaos caused by the post-Thanksgiving shoppers crowding the streets and sidewalks prior to the Army-Navy football game.
Somehow a clever marketing person turned this around to mean “in the black” Friday, when shopkeepers’ balance sheets went from in the red to in the black, and it was adapted to be known as a shopping event.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the phrase “Cyber Monday” meant, although as an E-Commerce business I’m endlessly being invited to participate in it. Seemingly, as sales moved online, but people’s internet speed wasn’t as good at home as it was at work, as soon as people got to work on the Monday, where their workplace had better internet connection, they would pretend to be working but in fact would be busy buying bargains online.
This is interesting because we often get a spike in sales on a Monday. Like, almost every Monday. Just wondering...?
So, in the UK our tradition is Boxing Day sales and in the USA it’s post Thanksgiving sales. Then Amazon grew to be the massive ubiquitous thing it is and Black Friday became a sales thing in the UK. We all love a bargain and it’s a great opportunity to get a good deal. But have you looked closely at those deals? It’s mostly stuff that the vendors want to get rid of. Or, prices have been inflated for a few months prior to Black Friday, then dropped to make them look like a great deal.
It's not just one or two days but Black Friday + Cyber Week now. People stop buying at other times because they’re waiting to buy it at the sale price. So for the businesses they’re not really celebrating being in the black because their cash flow would have been better off selling things steadily over the weeks leading up to Black Friday rather than everything all at once. Customers buying the stuff have to find a lot of money to make the most of all those bargains so credit cards are maxed out just before Christmas. The delivery drivers just get even more stressed and harassed than usual. And they’re just as busy in the weeks afterwards dealing with all the returns.
There’s just so much frenzy around it all. It’s loathsome. So we don’t do it. We sell products that save you money or last really well so they offer good value for money. If we have overstocks, end of line products, or seconds we sell these perennially in our “Woolly Good Deals”. Occasionally like once a year we have sales across the whole site, and these are EXCLUSIVE to our email subscribers.
Because we are obsessed with trees and for our own alternative to Black Friday we have Green Friday. So we always say, don’t buy anything from us unless you really need to. But if you do need it then thank you for buying from us and for every order received over the loathsome Black Friday Saturday Sunday weekend we will plant an additional tree. We already put 10% of our profits into our Community Interest Company Buy Land Plant Trees but in addition to that we’ll plant more for the sales that weekend.
And look, don’t feel bad about making the most of some of those Black Friday deals. I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite, writing this then splashing out on some discounted organic cotton jeans. Let’s shop mindfully and sustainably and bargainfully where the deals are genuine ones. I think Martin Lewis expresses it well in the Money Saving Expert email:
