Black Friday sales are testing the limits of time, space and also my patience, writes Alex Casey.
Mere seconds after setting foot inside Bed, Bath and Beyond, I was well and truly Beyond. As if the sea of stripes and florals wasn’t discombobulating enough, the BLACK FRIDAY SALE flyers fluttering from every valance and coverlet were inducing a kind of frenzy usually reserved for chimps rampaging a lab in the Planet of the Apes. I just wanted a new pillow, but the barrage of numbers was overwhelming – how to decide on 50% off a 70% wool pillow, or 70% off a 50% down pillow, when you could just get three charming animal-shaped soaps for $10?
In the throes of Black Friday madness, I panic-bought what can only be described as the single worst pillow I have ever encountered in my life. It’s a 95% duck feather jobby which unfortunately means 95% compatibility with sounding and feeling like a family-sized bag of potato chips. I botched my one and only Black Friday purchase, and it wasn’t even Black Friday. It was a Saturday, a week before Black Friday, so perhaps it makes sense that one would go utterly berserk when everything is made up and the days of the week no longer matter.
Weeks ago, PB Tech launched its Black Friday sale by way of a two-and-a-half-hour livestream, which included co-owner Pat singing ‘Spanish Eyes’ with a live band, a raffle draw, and PB Tech trivia (though we all know the best trivia of all). That was just the beginning – all month brands have either been shrieking about Black Friday “warm-up sales” (The Iconic), counting down the seconds until Black Friday (Kmart), or already deep into a Black Friday state of mind like Mitre 10, whose Black Friday sale finishes on WEDNESDAY December 3.
Black Friday is an American import, the name originally assigned to the crash of the gold market in 1869, then used by Philadelphia police in the 1950s to describe traffic chaos after Thanksgiving, and eventually catching on across the US in the 80s as the start of the shopping season, where retail profits would turn from “in the red” to “in the black”. Held on the first Friday after Thanksgiving (November 27), Black Friday crept into Aotearoa in the 2010s – the decade began with the odd Apple sale and ended with the declaration “move over Boxing Day”.
Bodo Lang, professor of marketing analytics at Massey University, says Black Friday is just another example of American culture that has seeped into our daily lives. “With our popular culture still being largely dominated by the US, we still take quite easy cues from America such as events like this,” he says. “Retailers are always looking for an opportunity to get customers in-store, and special occasions like this offer that opportunity for them to extract extra money from our pockets – money that we otherwise probably wouldn’t have spent.”
He also confirms that imported sale events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Singles’ Day in Aotearoa are getting bigger and more aggressive every year. “There’s a real ballooning of these sales going on, an expansion of not just the duration of how long they are, but just how many there are in a year.” So why are we stuck in a perpetual sale cycle? “If you want to simplify it all down to one reason, it’s just about making money. It’s about getting people onto the website, or in store, capturing their attention and getting them excited to spend money.”
And in a year where the economy is shit, the unemployment rate is at a nine-year high, and journalists are churning their own butter just to get by, Lang adds that Black Friday sales can prey on the vulnerable. “There are a lot of people who are hurting, who’ve lost their jobs and livelihoods, and so they would be super responsive to anything that offers them dollars off anything, be it bananas or Bluetooth speakers,” he says. “I think there are a lot of people who have to be careful around these types of sales promotions right now.”
Lang’s advice to shoppers this Black Friday (which in some cases is tomorrow, and in others has already been happening all month), is simple. “It sounds incredibly boring, but it really is about not being impulsive and taking your time thinking about needs versus wants. What is the best type of product in that category that you need to buy, and what is the best price you can get for it?” If you must buy something, he recommends doing research through tools like PriceSpy and PriceMe, as well as reading Consumer NZ guides and independent online reviews.
The bleakest part is that these enormous imported sales events are likely only just getting started. “I think the sky is the limit,” says Lang. “Marketers are always looking for opportunities to loosen the consumer purse and they will do whatever they can, legally, to do that.” Indeed, after Black Friday comes Cyber Monday, then Christmas sales, then Boxing Day and New Year sales, and so begins another year of shopping until we all have to escape the heat death of the mall by taking a dip in our bubbling ocean, only to be drowned by a kraken of Shein leggings.
All that said, if anyone is after a pillow that sounds and feels like a bag of chips, I’ve got a really good Black Friday deal for you.
