Fuck You Black Friday!

Fuck You Black Friday

Thanksgiving and Giving Thanks

Our family had a great Thanksgiving day today. We got a chance to visit with family and spend time together catching up and playing some board games. We also had a chance to each talk about the many things that we are thankful for in 2014. It was touching and insightful as a parent to hear about the things that our kids were thankful for.

Now that Thanksgiving day is here, we are nearly forced by retailers to move onto Christmas even before the day is through! That’s right folks, we’re being asked to move on from giving thanks and to focus on greed and consumerism before the morning parade – what the fuck? I’ve probably watched over 100 ads today (we don’t really watch TV in our house thanks god) about different Black Friday events… Fuck you Black Friday!

Why Does Black Friday Exist?

I was doing a little research on wikipedia around the history of Black Friday and found some interesting tidbits. It seems that popular retailers have historically hosted parades as a way to ushering in Christmas. Retailers used to have an unwritten rule about advertising for Christmas sales before Thanksgiving was over.

That’s great, but where does Black Friday come from? Well, once Thanksgiving was over, retailers are in a mad rush and fight-to-the-death competition to bring in as much money as they can before Christmas arrives. This drives retailers to pull all kinds tricks out of their asses to manipulate people into buying crap for people that isn’t really at all needed. The BIGGEST advertising tricks in the book (I write about many of there here in the article advertising strategies to brainwash you) that the retailers employ for Black Friday are social proofing and scarcity.

Retailers have constructed this one event that you feel you HAVE to attend or you will really miss out. Afterall, everyone else is buying and getting the deals. You don’t want to miss this one-day sale do you?? Again, I say fuck you Black Friday!

Looking at the trends (see the table below from Wikipedia) from a retailers perspective, the whole Black Friday thing seems to be working on us. The sales below come from Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and projected Sunday sales.

Year	Date	Survey Published	Shoppers, millions	Average Spent	Total Spent	Consumers Polled	Margin for Error
2013	Nov 29	Dec 1	249	$413.02	$61.4 billion	4,864	1.7%
2012	Nov 23	Nov 25	247	$423.66	$59.1 billion	4,005	1.6%
2011	Nov 25	Nov 27	226	$398.62	$52.5 billion	3,826	1.6%
2010	Nov 26	Nov 28	212	$365.34	$45.0 billion	4,306	1.5%
2009	Nov 27	Nov 29	195	$343.31	$41.2 billion	4,985	1.4%
2008	Nov 28	Nov 30	172	$372.57	$41.0 billion	3,370	1.7%
2007	Nov 23	Nov 25	147	$347.55	$34.6 billion	2,395	1.5%
2006	Nov 24	Nov 26	140	$360.15	$34.4 billion	3,090	1.5%
2005	Nov 25	Nov 27	132	$301.81	$26.8 billion	n/a	n/a

Gray Thursday is Even Worse!

See that big 16% jump up in 2011? Well, if Black Friday weren’t enough for these retail assholes, now they are encroaching on our Thanksgiving holiday! The lovely folks at Walmart were the first to break rank in 2011 and open at 10pm on Thanksgiving day. Fast-forward to 2014 and some stores are open most of Thanksgiving day to eek out another couple billion in sales dollars. Walmart has shifted 90% of their money saving deals to Thanksgiving day. The only deals they now have on Friday are for tires and guns. Again – what the fuck is wrong with us?!? Fuck you Black Friday and fuck you Gray Thursday!

Let’s Celebrate Buy Nothing Day!

Why do we participate in these kinds of things? Sure, you will be “saving” a some money, but is it worth sacrificing time spent with family on this important holiday? Shouldn’t we be taking as pause as a nation to give thanks for the many blessings that we have? This instant “skipping of Thanksgiving” seems pretty unhealthy for our culture and our nation.

Have you ever heard of Buy Nothing Day (BND)? It’s the international day of protest against consumerism which happens to also fall on the day after Thanksgiving 🙂 I know that I will be celebrating Buy Nothing Day tomorrow, and I feel like I’m close to convincing my wife to skip the whole damn Black Friday and Gray Thursday thing all together.

It feels a little strange saying this on a personal finance blog with topics devoted to saving money, but I know that this is one time I’d rather NOT save money. I would much rather spend some extra time with my wife than be caught in a mass stampede of people. I think that Buy Nothing Day will be a great holiday for us to celebrate going forward!