Why I don’t buy into Black Friday
By: Tailored
Tags: Black Friday, Consumerism, Tradition, Consumption

Now that the dust has settled from Black Friday and Cyber Week, I thought it was about time to sit back and reflect on just what this retail phenomenon means and why we shouldn’t embrace it with quite the open arms that we seem to!

Black Friday isn’t an age-old tradition. Whilst it started in the US in September 1869, it didn’t actually hit our shores until a full 141 years later! Introduced by the online retail monopoly Amazon, the concept of Black Friday was brought to us digitally in 2010, with ASDA repping the IRL three years later.

For such a latecomer to tradition it has always confused me as to why we wholeheartedly embraced this. The run-up to Christmas for me has always been full of activities, themed outings and a slow, Christmassy, overly tinselled build-up from the beginning of December. It was always a time of counting Christmas Trees in car rides home, eating mince pies and wandering through the high streets checking out the over the top Christmas Windows.

This is why I’m not so sold on Black Friday. What used to be a slow build-up to the festive season, is not replaced with a huge rush for sales, making it feel like December now arrives with a bang (or a violent queue spreading through Oxford Circus). The end of November marks its arrival with utter chaos and unprecedented waste. We no longer have the gifting build-up that I love — pottering about the shops or scanning the Argos catalogue for what you want from Santa. We have a disastrous day where everyone panics to get the best deal and the majority of the money spent is on ourselves.

This promotion of needless consumption doesn’t even help our economy. The biggest winners of the Black Friday madness are high street retailers and big-name brands. Smaller, local brands — forced into pre-Christmas sales to not miss out on market share, are actually not seeing the benefits. As reported by Pricesearcher, ‘85% of UK retailers now feel pressured to participate in Black Friday despite knowing it’ll have an adverse impact on annual revenues’. It breaks my heart to know that all the little local brands who make Christmas feel personal and special are now being dragged into the end of November onslaught and have to participate so they don’t miss out on the attention. Some use the sales to buy presents, which whilst financially commendable — pulls further focus from the sheer pleasure of gift-giving. Price based decisions feel so much more impersonal than searching for the perfect gift and enjoying all the little touchpoints along the way.

The impact on the environment is even worse! A report published on Metro online shows that a massive 80% of items and the plastic packaging they are wrapped in will end up as waste, meaning they will be incinerated and dumped in a landfill. We get so caught up in the marketing and hype that we don’t stop to think about what we’re actually buying and whether it will make us happy.

What was once an exciting build-up to Christmas and the gifts to give and receive on the 25th, now feels like a mad panic to not get FOMO from the bargains. And it just feels so selfish. One of the most important output for me is memories. What we do, how we interact and ultimately the feelings we remember are so key to my happiness. The build-up to Christmas without Black Friday is something I miss. Waiting until the 25th to slowly unwrap your gifts and marvel that your family got it right far outweighs the heavy feeling of consumption across a few days so you can save the 20% on things you probably don’t even want feels really empty and I decide to not buy into it.

www.tailoredandmade.com