Black Friday is a rather new phenomenon is the UK imported from America I believe. A time for shopping over the Thanksgiving holiday. I'm sure my American readers can tell me the history and traditions of the event.
It began here in 2013, This year there has been a lot of hype surrounding it with retailers claiming it would be the biggest trading day of the year. Stores were purportedly organising staff to get ready as early as 6am. Although some reports claimed people would be fighting one another for bargains other reports stated that as much as 40% of goods bought on this day would be returned in the following days.
Crazy shopping does not appeal to me and I avoided the shops altogether (lucky I had a suitable picture from our traditional sales day - Boxing Day (the day after Xmas), now that's different, that's a tradition!
7 comments:
I don't know the history only that people have been out shopping on the day after Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. I stopped doing it probably 20 years ago when it started to get ridiculously crazy. That would have happened when it became a "news" item and reporters were reporting on crowds here and there and fights that broke out and so on. I personally never witnessed any fighting. I think the only reason it started is that so many people take Friday off of work after Thanksgiving so they take that opportunity to do some Christmas shopping before the stores sell out. Yesterday I drove toward Scottsdale and saw huge electronic signs directly mall traffic to various parking garages. Needless to say, I avoided the mall and found a nice outdoor space to take a long walk.
I've got enough food to eat, enough clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in and a chair to sit in, enough things to do and more than enough things to dust - why would I want to go shopping?
It's called Black Friday because it has been the busiest shopping day of the year (for reasons explained by Sharon Anck above) and businesses took in so much money that their books would finally show a profit ("in the black) if they were showing a loss prior to that ("in the red"). I avoid Black Friday at all cost! Too much craziness for me, though I hear it was not quite so awful as expected this year.
Sounds so revolting I have always kept away from shops on this day.
I tried to keep away from the shops, but had to take something back - then it hit me why rudeness and pushing and shoving reigned highly! Yes, I was in the danger zone and so came out again. Why people had to rush to some of the shops when it was quite clearly labelled that it was going on for the weekend I don't know. I'll go back on Monday!
It's been going on here in Canada in recent years too... mostly because retailers didn't like the idea of shoppers going cross border shopping on that day and decided to head them off with huge sales of their own. I'm surprised that the concept crossed the pond.
I am amazed to see Black Friday showing up all around the globe these days, even though in countries other than the USA it is not associated with the Thursday holiday of Thanksgiving. I was in southern Africa all of November and they promote Black Friday there, too. Crazy!
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