Let’s “Unpack” Black Friday

It’s the most joyous time of the year: the holiday season. For some, it’s all about enjoying beautiful moments with their loved ones, for the majority of the population, as the Minimalists point out, it’s the holiday “shopping” season.

For the uninitiated, the last Friday of the month of November, the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year in the US and it’s called Black Friday.

The day after Thanksgiving is generally perceived as the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season. Many stores offer highly promoted sales on Black Friday and open very early, such as at midnight, or may even start their sales at some time on Thanksgiving. A majority of schools and organizations (not counting the retail companies) have both Thanksgiving and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend, makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers.

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), more than 164 million consumers plan to shop over Thanksgiving weekend. And 71% of those shoppers — that’s a good 116 million — will do that shopping on Black Friday.

However, Black Friday is not only famous for exclusive offers; it’s also well known for the mad rush of frenzied shoppers who are lured by enticing doorbuster deals. On top of that, in their hunt for bargains and deals, many otherwise civil people find themselves pushing and shoving fellow shoppers over coveted merchandise. And in the worst cases, shoppers and employees have been hurt and even killed in stampedes to get to cheap televisions, video game consoles and laptops. These are not the actions of rational individuals, and it’s sad that we have downgraded ourselves to fight with people and harm them over things that we don’t even need.

A Brief History of Black Friday

The most commonly regurgitated story behind the Black Friday tradition links it to retailers. As the story goes, after an entire year of operating at a loss (“in the red”) stores would supposedly earn a profit (“went into the black”) on the day after Thanksgiving, because holiday shoppers spent so much money on discounted merchandise in the stores. Though it’s true that retail companies used to record losses in red and profits in black when doing their accounting, this version of Black Friday’s origin may sound official, but it is inaccurate.

The true story behind Black Friday, however, is not as “joyous” as retailers want us to believe and many people are still unaware of it. Early in the 1950s, police officers in the city of Philadelphia used this term to describe the mayhem that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers poured into the city along with tourists who arrived for the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Not only were Philly cops not allowed to take the day off, but they would also have to work extra-long shifts in order to deal with the chaos due to additional crowds and traffic. Add to that, the woes of catching shoplifters who would take advantage of the craziness and confusion in stores to slip off with merchandise.

However, sometime in the late 1980s, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the “red to black” concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, which has pretty much stuck after that.

Over the years, stores started opening earlier and earlier on Black Friday, and now the most dedicated shoppers can head out right after finishing their Thanksgiving meals. In addition, the one-day sales bonanza has gradually morphed into a four-day event, and spawned other “retail holidays” such as Small Business Saturday/Sunday and Cyber Monday.

The occurrence of Black Friday and the ensuing profits have even propelled giant corporations to have retail-directed special annual holidays during the year. A good example of this is Amazon’s Prime Day that takes place all around the world on the same day.

Black Friday All Around the World

Black Friday has become so popular that this shopping tradition has seeped into cultures and countries all around the world that don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving.

Countries like UK, Canada, Australia and other places that have British ties celebrate Boxing Day which is a national holiday. Millions of shoppers flock to stores in hopes of finding bargains. And the scenes very much resemble those of Black Friday in the US. Hordes of shoppers transform into “mobs” in their hunt for Boxing Day deals. And over the years, along with brick-and-mortar stores, more and more people are opting for online retailers as well. On top of that, stores in the UK have started offering Black Friday deals following Thanksgiving, despite it being a holiday unique to the US. It started back in 2010, when Amazon introduced the concept of Black Friday to Britain and it has since become the biggest shopping day in the UK. Stores like English chains House of Fraser and Topshop as well as Amazon online, now offer Black Friday deals for things like clothing and electronics. And bargain hunters, like in the US, have been known to get quite “competitive” in stores as well.

In Norway, Black Friday started as a publicity stunt campaign back in 2010 to increase the sales to the shopping mall Norwegian Outlet. Since the introduction, it has been promoted every year in a larger and growing market all over the country.

Black Friday was introduced in Spain in 2015 and has become immensely popular now. Spanish retailers, like clothing stores Zara and Mango, saw a 35% increase in sales during Black Friday weekend in 2017 from the previous year as people have embraced this occasion.

Black Friday has also garnered great attention from Brazilians. While In Mexico, the government and retailing industry have created an annual weekend of discounts and deals, El Buen Fin, meaning “the good weekend” in Spanish, inspired by Black Friday, which also takes place during the Thanksgiving weekend. On this four-day weekend, major retailers extend their store hours and offer special promotions, including extended credit terms and price promotions.

Black Friday is little known in India, as its shopping seasons are different. However, the big e-commerce retailers in India are trying to emulate the concept of shopping festivals from the US like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon have been offering discounted products on the major festivals in India. You have Black Friday like deals offered on Amazon and other online retailers as part of Diwali festive season which happens around the same time in October or November. Last year, the e-commerce industry, led by Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart, was projected to rake in $3 billion in sales during the five-day Diwali Festival alone.

This year on Amazon, although the Great Online Shopping Festival was held on October 21 through 25, you could find difficult to resist offers and deals in multiple waves throughout the month. Interestingly, Google Trends data for 19–25 November 2018 in India showed that one-third of all queries related to Black Friday sales were recorded on Friday (35.7 percent). The research conducted in India in 2018 reported that 56 percent of surveyed Indians are aware of the existence of Black Friday.

The Evil Ploy of Retailers

Retailers prepare months in advance for Black Friday and come up with creative ways to stimulate our insatiable desire to buy more.

NRF President and CEO, Matthew Shay says, “Consumers today want more than just discounts… they want exclusive offerings and a good reason to spend their discretionary budgets,” He further adds, “We could witness a sea of change this holiday season as consumers’ reliance on extremely deep discounts over the biggest shopping weekend of the year shifts to more of a ‘wait-and-see’ mentality around what retailers will be offering on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. We are positive retailers have a few tricks up their sleeve that will draw their customers to their stores and websites, deciding the deals are worth it after all.”

Retailers throw all kinds of temptations our way. Doorbuster sales. One day only! Unmissable offers. Now or Never. Early bird specials! Get the best deal! Last chance. Act now! Shop at half price. While supplies last.

By employing these anxiety-inducing buzzwords, retailers fuel the frenzy of Black Friday. They cultivate the illusion of scarcity, and hence pressure people into buying items now and asking questions later.

All they want is to see carts stacked up with multiple items. As Target’s CEO Brian Cornell says, “What I’ve been most interested in is what’s in the basket. You look at the people who you know came out for a specific [item], but then they’ve actually taken the time to shop other categories, which is really important. The fear here is seeing baskets or carts with one item.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the panic when we believe that our resources are limited. Unfortunately, this drives people to believe they need to buy up bargains fast — even when some of those “bargains” aren’t bargains at all.

In reality, the Black Friday deals aren’t even that good after all. They’re only designed to look attractive on paper, and to get us to act on impulse. Retailers try to seduce us with a limited-time offer and coerce us into purchasing stuff we don’t need by creating the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Retailers also take advantage of human psychology and invoke our primal brain, forcing us to behave like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, by creating false scarcity and using alarming and somewhat frightening colors (mostly shades of red) to highlight their offers and deal prices.

As a result, many people end up spending more on items even if they can’t afford those items. And due to this, they accrue heaps of credit card debt.

Black Friday is just right around the corner, and it’ll be safe to assume that a majority of people are still paying off the credit card debt they racked up over the holidays last year.

Kimberly Palmer, personal finance expert at NerdWallet says, “It’s so easy to overspend with all of the excitement and… people forget that they will have to pay all of that debt off eventually.” Instead of spending recklessly, she recommends setting a budget ahead of time.

Along with that, I’ll also recommend not to use credit cards at all if you want to buy items this holiday shopping season, especially if you’re in deep debt right now. It may be difficult to control your impulses, but in the long run, it’ll be totally worth it.

The retailers these days set up multiple traps both in stores and online, and due to these clever marketing strategies, they are winning big. It’s rare to see a cart with just one item in it. The giant corporations are doing all they can to keep us buying more and as consumers, it gets really hard for us to not submit to these appealing offers.

This had led to manic over-consumerism in our current culture today that is now known as the “Target effect”, which is defined as: The result of going into a store, intending to buy a few things, and leaving with much more.

Marketers these days have many tricks up their sleeves to get us to buy more than what we truly need.

Many retailers “recycle” Black Friday ads with the same deal pricing on some products from year to year. While consumers come to expect deeper discounts each year on a wider variety of products new and old, this hardly happens. A recent study reported that 90% of the stores had Black Friday “doorbuster” deals that existed the previous last year. The same study found retailers would often try to trick shoppers on Black Friday with knockoff deals from no names, shady rebate offers, and misleading original price tags.

On Black Friday, retailers create the illusion that you’re getting an enormous discount by reducing a product’s price by some significant percentage. But in truth, the “sale price” is often what they intended to sell the product for in the first place.

Marketers invade newspapers, TV, magazines, radio, billboards, you name it. It’s hard to escape advertisements and special offers, whether you’re out on the street, or online, the latter being full of marketing landmines these days.

Most e-commerce sites employ what are called “cookies” to track online shoppers. These tiny computer files store information about our browsing and purchasing habits, so when we return to a particular site the retailer serves up targeted offers based on how we behaved in the past. This practice can be troublesome to online consumers who don’t regularly bargain shop. An online shopper whose cookies indicate they are consistently willing to pay full price might not see the same Black Friday deals and promotions as someone whose cookies communicate a preference for discount offers, promo codes and clearance sales. That’s why it’s recommended to shop online using a web browser set to “incognito mode”. This masks your previous cookies, so the retailer site won’t recognize you by your past shopping habits.

Retailers have also found that offering free shipping is an effective way to get online shoppers to load up their carts. However, some retailers only offer this perk if we spend a certain amount, such as $35 or more per order. But if we keep adding extra items that we don’t need to our cart just to hit the minimum purchase amount, we’re not really saving money in the end, are we?

Lisa Rowan, personal finance expert at The Penny Hoarder, also warns, “One trap shoppers fall into is miscalculating the total amount of the purchase before checking out. Shipping costs are calculated after Black Friday discounts have been taken off at checkout. So even if you think you’re purchasing enough to get free shipping, you might find that you’re still a few dollars away from getting that benefit.” That’s why it’s best to fight the urge to spend more online simply to get the free shipping benefit.

Social media sites also keep the retailers happy by letting them advertise and reduce the friction to sales by using tags that directly link to their products. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

In spite of these devious practices employed by the retailers, unfortunately, most people actually don’t care. In fact, they want more of it. It’s sad but on Black Friday, we all consume gluttonously without regard for the damage we’re inflicting on ourselves and our finances. We let our greedy selves loose and we run around buying things in order to satisfy the insatiable hunger within us, and to try to fill the void within us that can’t be filled by stuff.

It’s a shame that shopping has become such a major pastime among us. As Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus write in their blog theminimalists.com, “Shopping. This one word, although birthed from great intentions, has fundamentally changed our outlook from blissful to grim, from jolly to anxious, from celebrating Christmas to surviving the holidays. It’s upsetting, and with consumption’s vicious inertia, it seems there’s no way for us to exit the speeding train of consumerism.”

Choosing the Path of Conscious Materialism

The truth is that retailers actually don’t care how much money we save, for them it’s all about how much profit they can make. They’re focusing on their bottom line, not ours.

The holiday shopping season is extremely important for these giant corporations. On a good year, many stores reap a significant percentage of their annual revenue in the five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. That’s insane!

And because the stakes are so high — the holiday season is a ‘make or break’ situation for them — the retailers do all that they can, leaving no stone unturned, to devise plans for exclusive deals, doorbuster sales and once-a-year offers — anything to attract a swarm of customers to their stores.

As much as we’d like to believe that the Black Friday deals are designed for our benefit, it’s not true. These companies are not at all being generous, in fact, they are doing all they can to get as much money out of our pockets as they can to keep their investors and board members happy, and their balance sheets looking good, even if it involves participating in unethical practices. And this is not going to end any time soon!

They want you in their stores or on their sites, they want you to keep adding items in your cart and spending money, and participating in the craziness. But if you choose, you can simply refuse over-consuming and take responsibility for your purchases. Instead of running after Black Friday deals, you can embrace the path of conscious materialism. You can just say no to this insanity and instead be intentional about the few things that you do decide to purchase during the holiday season. In that way, we not only get those items that truly add value to our lives and others’, but we also make our shopping happy, joyous and stress-free.

As we choose the path of conscious materialism, and as we buy high-quality items that align with our values, not only do we elevate our living experience and put our hard-earned money to good use, but we also contribute to a better and more sustainable world.

Alternatives to Gift-giving

We don’t have to distance ourselves from the spirit of the holidays and avoid gift-giving altogether. But instead, we can choose to think out of the box and come up with newer, better ways to enhance the holiday experience for ourselves and our loved ones. There are many avenues to celebrate the holidays intentionally without spending a fortune. Here a few tips for you to consider this holiday season:

1. Gift experiences: Instead of gifting material things, we can gift experiences to our friends and family that are intentional and inexpensive. It can be tickets to a concert or a stand-up comedy show, or a nice meal at a local restaurant.There are some great ideas for the experiences that we can gift in the essay ‘Ideas for a debt-free Christmas’ by The Minimalists. Here’s the list that they have made:

• Sunsets.
• Theater.
• Beaches.
• Concerts.
• Festivals.
• Hayrides.
• Massages.
• Museums.
• Art walks.
• Road trips.
• Babysitting.
• Yoga classes.
• Cryotherapy.
• Rock climbing.
• Holiday lights.
• Sporting events.
• Meditation retreat.
• Russian bathhouse.
• Christmas-tree hunting.

1. Gift consumables: If physical gifts are required, we can give people consumables such as books, coffee, chocolates or essential oils.
2. Cash: A good alternative is simply giving cash. Some people really appreciate this as they are free to use it whichever way they want.
3. Make your own gifts: You can create meaningful gifts for your loved ones, for instance, knitting or attempting to knit a sweater or a scarf for someone special, making a home-cooked meal from scratch, bake some cupcakes or cookies, or create some artwork pieces using clay. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I’m sure they’ll be some of the most memorable gifts for the people that you love.
4. Make donations: If the people close to us have everything that they need, we can make donations in their honor to food banks and other charitable organizations. They’ll appreciate them more than the goodies such as scented candles and neckties that other people got for them.
5. Gift your time and attention: In my personal opinion, the best and most loving gift you can give someone is your time, your presence and your undivided attention. Just spend quality time with your loved ones, no purchase necessary.

Avoid the Consumerism Trap

Black Friday is upon us. And it’s that time of the year when retailers will bombard us with deals on everything from televisions and tech gadgets to toys and clothes.

But we all have the choice to not fall into the consumerism trap and make intentional purchases. There’s no need to succumb to the pressure and the best thing we can do for ourselves this holiday shopping season is to not buy into the hype. We can convert our shopping holidays into simple holidays, and enjoy meaningful things and experiences instead of participating in meaningless purchases to showcase our love for others.

We can let go of trampling people for things we don’t need, and instead treat them with love and respect. As the Minimalists put it beautifully, “Love people, use things. The opposite never works.”

Let go of the insanity of Black Friday, and choose to go in the slow and simple lane. Just relax and enjoy the holidays, and focus on quality, not quantity, on giving and not taking, on people, not on things.

Spend quality time together with your loved ones, enjoy delicious meals, play in the snow, connect with nature, volunteer for a good cause in your neighborhood, or get immersed in the holiday spirit. Buying is not loving, loving is loving. Don’t let price tags and special offers overshadow the bonds that you share with others.

This holiday season, let’s choose love over hate, peace over chaos and letting go over pointless consumerism.

Subscribe via email to The Karma Yogi newsletter and get a Free eGuide. No spam ever!

Sign up for the ‘21-Day Karma Yogi Gratitude Challenge’ here.

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

Originally published at http://www.thekarmayogi.blog on November 26, 2019.