Black Friday: Another US import the French love to hate
PARIS: Having adopted hamburgers, Halloween and a host of English words, some in France are worried about the latest cultural import from America: the day of rampant consumerism known as Black Friday.
Unheard of only a few years ago, the cut-price deals made the television news bulletins Friday as local retailers copied their American counterparts in trying to lure in shoppers ahead of the Christmas season.
According to a survey conducted for online shopping giant Amazon by the CSA polling group, 52 percent of French people said they planned to take part this year, up from just 21 per cent in 2016.
And though there were none of the frenzied scenes usually seen in the United States of buyers fighting each other for TVs, for some in France the flurry of marketing and conspicuous consumption was too much to bear.
“I feel like we’re importing a style of consumption which is sort of Anglo-Saxon,” Sandrine Roudaut, an author and publisher on ethical buying, told AFP after taking to Twitter to vent her disapproval.
Like thousands of others, she used the hashtag #sansmoi (Without Me) and said she was spending no money Friday in a quiet personal protest against the mass binge-buying.
“I hadn’t heard of this Black Friday thing before, but I find it sad,” one French shopper, PierreFrancois Grosjean, told AFP as he peered in the window of a FNAC electronics store in Paris. “It’s another English word, it’s annoying.”— AFP