Black Friday in Britain? Why?
 

Just seeing scenes of Oxford Street during today's disturbance there I saw several signs on stores touring Black Friday Sales - why is this Friday Black Friiday in the U.K. In U.S. the meaning comes from the day when big stores allegedly first came into the black during the year and kept in black thru Christmas sales. But this could not have been the case in U.K. Right?

So why Black Friday - and stores touting it?

Do folks line up for hours to get in like in U.S. and are stores open 5-6 am?

Black Friday has always been one of the most popular sales days in U.S. for generations but in Britain?

U.S. does not have Boxing Day sales to my knowledge.

Lots of Black Friday signs in Stockholm as well but I didn’t see that many people shopping.

Black Friday is everywhere in Europe. Anything to turn a buck. Most of the "bargains" aren't.
I blame Amazon for spreading it.

No, Black Friday was already insane in the US before Amazon came on the scene. I moved to Italy 20 years ago, and Black Friday was at that time a real zoo in the larger department stores. If anything, Amazon moved a lot of it inside the domestic walls, which is an improvement, to my mind.

Black Friday doesn't seem to be taking off in Italy, although the merchants are certainly trying. However, Italians who have no idea of what Thanksgiving is have heard of Black Friday.

Plenty of Black Friday in Portugal. Complete with the stampede into the store at midnight :-(

Don't understand why people participate in this

If anything, Amazon moved a lot of it inside the domestic walls, which is an improvement, to my mind.>

Cyber Monday is more an Amazon creation I believe or at least why it is so popular - online specials like Black Friday.

I didn't venture out of the house today as I was really tired from Thanksgiving and didn't need to do any errands, so I don't know whether there was any shopping brouhaha going on, but it's been widely advertised in the media and all the promo bulletins we get every Tuesday. Never participated in it back in the USA anyway. I hate shopping, though, except for food and old things for our old house. I did note there was a huge fight at some Alabama mall. Seems par for the course.

Yes, also see lots of Black Friday advertisements here in Bavaria -- as hetismij2 notes, "Anything to turn a buck." That's a universal language.

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Advertised down under as well - it's a global economy

Even in the US, it kind of depends on where you are. For some people, it’s huge, and for other people, it really isn’t. I did Black Friday with a friend’s family once because I was curious; my parents never did it. And it was pretty much what I’d expected. The stuff on sale is largely not stuff I’d buy, for myself or for Christmas gifts. And the stuff I would buy...well, I’m sorry, that 10 bucks off that scrabble game is just not worth being up at 5 am for.

I’ve noticed that most of the Black Friday activity where I live now is more about Canadians coming down to shop, and a lot of that is because it’s the Canadians that are the main market for the mall and big box stores here anyway. Probably a good 75% of the license plates any weekend are Canadian. Any sale is a good sale. But it hasn’t been a thing with my coworkers or friends at all. Don’t know if it’s because they’re not mall people, or they don’t want to deal with the traffic, or they’re more about cyber Monday...probably all the above.

Black Friday in the UK is a concept rather than a specific day. Black Friday sales have been going on for a week or two already.

Another import from the crazy country. Drives me mad. Interviews on Radio 4 BBC last night showed that for most businesses it is a useless (negative profit) activity, with a fair few companies breaking the law on the definition of the word "sale" that is they put the prices up before (should be for a month) the day so they can show a price reduction.

Luckily most Brits are savvy so they know the tricks and sales look bad except in Oxford street (still the gun alert will have reduced the demand this time).

I cannot wait for "Cyber Monday" to begin.

with a fair few companies breaking the law on the definition of the word "sale" that is they put the prices up before (should be for a month) the day so they can show a price reduction.>>

Which? did a study showing that many retailers are charging higher prices on "Black Friday" than earlier in the year. Also lots of misleading adverts like one that looked as if the price for a home hub device was £70; in fact it meant there was £70 off the price which was much higher.

Overall I think you spend less if you budget during the year for things you really need and then find the right deal at the time. For example, I needed a new oven recently; I went to a proper dealer and found a model that I liked which was £300 less than the one I'd been looking at on line. They also delivered it and fitted it for free and took the old one away for £15.

Sometimes the old fashioned methods are the best.

Black Friday in Spain too. Also we never sued to have Halloween. Just a grand "exploitation" of culture (if it can be called culture) via TV or interweb.

Amazon.it started Cyper Monday today. Black Friday was five days I think. I bought a few things but most of the things I looked at weren't exactly cheap. A few seemed higher then normal. Still I got a few things I needed.

Black Friday sales were started in Canada a few years ago to try and keep people from going to the US to shop.

"Another import from the crazy country. Drives me mad"

You're not alone Bilbo.

If you don't like imports from other countries, you don't like globalized capitalism. Don't think you get to pick and choose.

Also, if you want to go on with "xmas traditions", you deserve this reality.

"Don't think you get to pick and choose."

The individual does, it is concerning though that so many people get swept up in the hype without thinking "am I really getting a bargain"??

The media overhypes it, though. I don’t know how many people really get swept away in it. Or at least any more than they’d get swept away with any kind of sale. The people I know who do it go specifically with a list, and generally they do know how much they’re saving.

I don’t see why it would be any more concerning than people who are really into outlet mall shopping. And we get plenty of tourists, especially Australians, who are crazy for that. Generally speaking, I think the problem is less sales and more the general consumerism and waste around the holidays. That’s certainly not unique to the US.

Yeh Black Friday now stretches several days from what I see on TV ads. Has lots its cache but some folks just love the idea of getting in line hours early for a few freebies and good for them.

Trouble is now that brand USA has been destroyed by brand TRUMP (trumped you might say) then the ugly american is loose in the world and it feels very uncomfortable.

Still at least we don't have "KFC day" yet :-)

"Still at least we don't have "KFC day" yet"

If it arrives bilbo, we'll just wing it!

Heavy discounts late in November (typically on the last Friday) didn't exist in the UK till 2010, when Amazon started doing them. They were followed in 2013 by Asda (a Walmart subsidiary) and gradually by some UK-owned retailers.

My memory is that the name was introduced by the media, not a retailer, and the term took a couple of years to migrate from newspaper copy to stores' promotional material. Certainly one of the US "Black Friday" pioneers told me that they long hesitated to use the term - because it'd look like Americanisation. Certainly the two US pioneers only started publicly talking about "Black Friday" long after UK competitors.

The US creation myth isn't really "stores don't break even till late Dec" anyway. Self-evidently, that can't be true of food chains or beachwear stores, and when the myth started, it was that <b> department stores </b> start making money in late November. Even were it true, it wouldn't be quite as shocking as it sounds: the norm among US retailers end their financial years at the end of Jan, so the myth is merely claiming that stores lose money for their first three quarters.

But two seconds looking at American retailers' quarterly results show how even that is codswallop. And as far as I can see: has been forever.

I doubt the fad - which is really so hard-wired in the US no commercial argument will kill it - will survive long in the UK.

Amazon petrifies UK retailers far less here: internet retailing is far more advanced than in the US, and the threat to conventional retailers comes from businesses like Primark, Aldi and Lidl who simply refuse to waste money on e-commerce. They've all put on share every year since the November madness started.

Asda was a real threat to other food chains before Walmart bought them: now they're just another player. And it's not just the Germans who are growing faster: non-discounters like Waitrose and even the new, food-credible, Co-op are now outperforming them.

Growth in UK retailing is coming from shops that don't engage in profit-destroying antics. Even the stupidest other UK retailers (a title for which there's intense competition) will realise over the next couple of years that throwing money away inevitably leads to bankruptcy.

In retailing as in almost everything else (except Internet unicorns) only the sane survive.

None of this can be blamed on Donald Trump, unless you think Donald Trump invented capitalism. All of it predates Donald Trump, and folks, there simply is no Santa Claus.

The American tradition of retailers going all out for Chistmas at the end of November began with a NYC department store called Macy's, which inaugurated the Macy's Day parade on Thanksgiving Day in the US. Thanksgiving Day is always in the last part of November in the US, and the Macy's Day parade was broadcast on TV from NYC (and still is). This event "kicked off" the retail push for Christmas shopping.

Big cities, department stores and TV networks lost their monopoly powers beginning with the Reagan years -- even before the internet was invented. The rise of suburbanization brought with it "big box" chain stores in America that featured heavily discounted single products, such as Toys R'Us or Payless Shoes etc etc.

It waa the big box toy stores that mainly introduced "Black Friday" (the day after the US Thanksgiving Thursday), creating a frenzy around the idea of getting your child the most popular Xmas Toy-of-The=Year (remember the Cabbage Patch doll?)

Internet shopping only recently began to ape the "Black Friday" model.

For Europe, it has only been recently that many of the key elements for "Black Friday" retailing have fallen into place. But even before that, European retailers became interested in commercializing holidays American-style that hadn't previously existed in Europe. The introduction of hoo-hah around hallowee or St Valentines Day in Europe owes nothing to Donald Trump and everthing to globalization and income inequality (poor foreigners in 3rd world countries make it cehaply, the affluent asset-holders of the western democracies are lured into the idea of consume, consume, consume as entertainment, status, sopihstication, what have you).

The competition in Xmas market tourism in Europe makes in inevitable that every form of hucksterism is going to be employed to attract the affluent global tourist whose chief fun in traveling is from a consumer standpoint: Xmas junk, fatty foods, lots of liquor.

Donald Trump doesn't even drink. he's not even the epitome of the new global consumer. he's actually rather retro, and suspicious of all those cheap chinese goods.

Me? I'd blame it on the aspirations of the eurozone

No I'm blaming it on a country that can vote for Trump.

You can't beat something we nothing. People who voted for Trump had excellent reasons for not voting for the alternative, especially since the alternative didn't think their votes were worth anything, and projected a ideology to voters -- the actual holders of power in a democracy -- that they were needed and was needed instead was educated rule by the wealthy view. A majority of people in any functioning democracy are not going to vote for that, for the same reason turkeys don't vote for Xmas. A political party that thinks like that is dooming itself to irrelevancy.


There is an interesting American movie called "Miracle on 34th St" which encapsulates the earliest protests against the drive of retailers to encourage brainless consumerism from November through December connected to Xmas. People actually have disliked "Black Friday" type retainling for more than 50 years.

correcting bad keyboard typos:

You can't beat something with notihing.

Democrats projected an ideology to voters that they were not needed (or respected)

As far as I can tell, the opponents of Donald Trump still believe that broadcasting insults at voters will change things for the better. Would suggest a re-think.

Black Friday (not Vendredi Noir) signs and billboards all over Paris.

Meanwhile, here in the home of Black Friday, the days of line-ups at 5 am to get one of the "limited quantity" giveaway items is gone. I am still using the $99 computer from a years ago Black friday. Now the sales start 2 weeks in advance, encroach on Thanksgiving Day itself, and continue beyond the actual Friday. And this year the sales are the usual percentage off inflated "reference prices" just like every other sale all year round, with no more giveaway prices. Dull, boring, not worth getting in line.

It's Gray Friday at best.

"U.S. does not have Boxing Day sales to my knowledge."

I do make a point to watch Raging Bull on Boxing Day, however.

((H))

Well yes Boxing Day here means piling up boxes from presents for recycling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)

the real origin of the term Black Friday -nothing to do with turning red ink to black as most including moi thunk!