It is Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving when shops offer huge discounts to shoppers who are ready to face their Christmas shopping.
A few years ago, those of us in the UK or Australia didn’t really know what Black Friday was. We hadn’t heard of it. Now, our marketers have taken Black Friday by the horns and we, too, get massive discounts and immense numbers of promotional emails telling us to get our 20% off, free shipping, BOGOFs, and so on. Even though we don’t have the cultural reference of Thanksgiving, we get the big sales that come after it.
Black Friday has become, to many, a symbol of the excesses of capitalism and an example of the Americanisation of the rest of the world. There have been protests outside Amazon warehouses in the UK today in rebellion against the concept (and, more to the point, against Amazon’s employment practices and social impact) and, now that we have Black Friday, we also have another concept from America based around the day: Buy Nothing Day.
The idea is simple and looks great: ignore the marketing fest, delete those emails, don’t venture onto Amazon’s website (or Argos’s or John Lewis’s) and resist the capitalist splurging. Let this day that is all about spending become a day that is all about resistance to the commercialisation of the world around us.
I’m not gonna lie, the hippie in me loves this idea. But the person who lived in poverty some years ago sees way beyond the initial appeal.
We are verging on the time of year when there is the biggest pressure to spend, spend, spend in the West. We are supposed to buy gifts for everybody from our kids’ teachers to our postal worker and, for a lot of people in society, this is a terrible pressure on already stretched finances. People compete to buy their children the biggest and the best, and gift bags get bigger as we absorb the pressure to keep consuming. But when the food bank is feeding you and your wait for benefits is five weeks long, there’s not an awful lot of splurging you can do.
Black Friday offers people the chance to get some of their Christmas gifts at a lower price, and suggesting that those people should eschew the discounts on some kind of principle is thoughtless.
Black Friday isn’t just great for present buying, in any case. If your washing machine packed in last week or your fridge broke last month, you might well have held out until Black Friday to uncover the best discounts when replacing these really expensive items.
Even for smaller items, Black Friday can be a much more affordable way of getting hold of clothing or shoes or a new bag. If you are disabled and need adaptive clothing, or fat and need bigger clothing, you normally don’t have many options to choose from, but Black Friday pushes even some exclusive retailers to drop their prices for a day.
If you want to spend today being blissfully anti-consumer? Brilliant. Fill yer boots. Enjoy the feeling of not “falling for” marketing campaigns and choosing how and where you spend your hard-earned cash.
But don’t judge others who have been spending. If someone bought their household essentials at a reduced price today, don’t make them feel small for having taken part in something that did, at its heart, save them cash. I’m lucky enough to be in work but many aren’t, and many who are still live in poverty. If someone wants or needs to put today’s goodies on a card so they don’t pay twice as much for the same items next week then I can’t see how you can criticise them.
Campaigning, including anti-capitalist and anti-consumer campaigning, needs to be done with sensitivity and the awareness that not everybody is privileged enough to be able to say no to items with money off. Nobody should be made to feel like they are selling out when they are, in fact, just about coping.
Image credit: Victoria Borodinova