Black Friday
This post perhaps has less to do with the Black Friday shopping phenomenon and more to do with having had enough of the advertising for Black Friday a full week before the Actual Black Friday.
I'm even seeing "Pre Black Friday" ads now. These Black Friday ads are from the companies that have started offering Black Friday ads, today!
I'm guessing that by offering Black Friday sales today, they are hoping to persuade the shoppers to spend their Black Friday-money at their shops today and perhaps run out of steam & money when the real Black Friday rolls around next week, beating their competitors.
Anyway some of you already know the story behind the Black Friday but for those of you who still haven't heard it, here it is.
Black Friday is the day of the year where the companies in the red(in trouble financially) have historically managed to move into black.(safety, from creditors, chapter 11 etc.)
Black Friday in the States is also the official start of the holiday shopping season. Some suggest that Black Friday is also the busiest shopping time, now week, of the year with December trailing behind as second.
So why or how has Black Friday moved into Canada? Well, if you're a Canadian company or even an American company that operates in Canada or has a Canadian presence, you don't want your shoppers to cross the boarder to do their holiday shopping there a full month & a half before your equivalent shopping-day, "Boxing Day" in Canada, do you?
Hence the adaptation of Black Friday in Canada.
By the way, for those of you reading this in Netherland, Germany, Finland, the UK,...could you please let me know if the Black Friday has made it's appearance in your countries?
I wonder how long before we start hearing about Cyber Monday sales? For those of you who don't yet know the origin of the Cyber Monday, it stared a decade or so ago when someone or companies etc. realized that not everyone wanted to brave the cold by camping outside of the stores the night before the Black Friday(I guess Thursday night), after a lovely Thanksgiving supper at a warm home, just so that they could access the heavily discounted though also very limited items.
That plus the fact that there are more introverts than extraverts. This by the way was going to be my PhD work but that's a whole other story, lol.
So as introverts did not & could not be bothered with the line-ups, having to see and make surface conversations or deal with parking spots,... they were avoiding the whole Black Friday mess. So once the companies figured this out + now with the fact that nearly everyone had access to a computer & internet connection..... and Cyber Monday was born, yay!
Of course at that time, their only hurdle was to convince the shoppers to give their credit cards over the internet and that it was safe to do so or at least not more unsafe than at a physical store.
Of course that is no-longer an issues 10-15 years into it.
There's also this fairly new event called "Small Business Saturday". I guess that's what I fall under.
Hoping that this year you make a purchase from the little guys :)
Happy BF/CM or Small Business Saturday shoppers!