The Cry of ‘sale!’ is all it takes to let slip dogs ofwar
HERE’S an idea – if Black Friday is such a runaway success, why don’t we just close the department stores for the other 51 weeks of the year? Come on, we could telescope our shopping habits into a much smaller timeframe.
That would still leave six days for the post-Christmas sales and the summer sales, and everybody could relax .
Before we start, perhaps we should define what is meant by the term ‘sale’. In my view, a reduction of 20% simply does not constitute a sale in the accepted sense of the term. A reduction of 20% is a move in the right direction, is all. And a reduction of 10%, as advertised by one local fashion shop, is obviously a pricing error. Nice try.
Black Friday is a manufactured shopping emergency, but Christmas itself, as every parent knows, has always been a shopping emergency. Christmas is a shopping war. The genius of Black Friday is to make the panic new.
Black Friday is now unstoppable, and all we can do is adapt to it. Black Friday, which falls the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, has become a tradition with astonishing speed.
It only started in America (in Philadelphia) in 1975. It didn’t become a national phenomenon in the US until the 1990s.
Yet it is now such a symbol of mainstream life there that this year protesters against the killing of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, picketed department stores chanting ‘ No Black Friday! No Black Friday!’
THE other Black Friday protesters in the United States were staff in retail giants like Walmart. They were objecting to what can only be called Black Friday creep. Big companies such as Walmart has started offering price reductions on Thanksgiving Day itself, in order to steal a march on their rivals. Welcome to Grey Thursday, which started in 2011.
And, as the staff in these stores might say now that they have to work on the national holiday that is specifically devoted to family togetherness: you’re welcome to it.
At a Tesco branch in the Stretford area of Manchester, a shopper, Jamie Hook, saw that the operator at the checkout was ‘in tears, terrified of it all’, as the crowd roared through the shop. She was instructed to shut up her till and go and work on crowd control. Lucky girl.
Just saying. It’s coming to a shopping centre near us. In fact, it’s here. Dundrum Town Centre held its first Black Friday and reported an increase in sales of 20% to 30% on the equivalent Friday last year. Dundrum had to open its overflow car park.
Arnotts said its sales were up 40% on the same day last year, and it wasn’t even participating in Black Friday as such. Nor was Brown Thomas, which staff described as ‘crazy busy’. Although they said last Wednesday was very busy as well.
But we haven’t had the riots yet. In Britain, a shopper likened the scenes at the local supermarket to ‘a warzone at midnight’.
Police criticised stores for their lack of safety precautions. Clergymen made statements saying that Black Friday was not really part of the Christmas message – but, actually, it is now.
In Britain there were arrests, punches, ambulances called, women knocked to the ground – and the big news was that footfall in Oxford Street went up 20%.
The one question we consumers never ask is: is it all really worth it? But then it’s hard to ask the right questions when you are in the grip of frenzy.
Running around reporting on Black Friday, I bought a suitcase – 50% off. The very nice lady from the Irish Times bought a handbag. Resistance is futile.
As a shopper, you only need to know two things. And we shoppers do know them. Firstly, that you will never beat the management and that Black Friday is for them, not for you.
Secondly, that when shoppers start to stampede, you kind of lose your mind. Shoppers are herd animals. One minute we are grazing contentedly in solitary splendour, taking it handy in the fashion area. Next thing you know, we’re in full gallop in the electronics section and we don’t care who dies.
We are exhibiting the three features of the crowd – anonymity, contagion and suggestibility – which were identified by the man who started writing about the collective mind in the 19th century, Gustave Le Bon (you can see where Simon gets it from). Le Bon said that crowds start exhibiting behaviour which can be characterised as primitive, unreasoning and emotional. And he wasn’t even queuing for a flat screen TV.
IHAVEN’T read Le Bon’s The Psychology Of Crowds. But you can bet your bottom euro that the retail managers have – they know how to play us. They give us a time limit, they group us into crowds, then they watch us sell to ourselves. This works even in the virtual world, when people shop and queue online, as they did on the websites of Curry’s, Argos and Tesco, as part of a virtual crowd.
And it doesn’t have to be called Black Friday. In China in November they have ‘ Singles Day’. In 2013 on that day, they sold 1.6 million bras in one hour. That is impressive. That is crowd control. With 40% of the world on the internet and credit cards almost everywhere we are a consumer culture on a global scale, and there is no real way of telling what will happen next.
In the past there have been protests – again, coming from America – in the form of ‘Buy Nothing Day’ which must have been a direct response to Black Friday.
But even supporters of ‘ Buy Nothing Day’ – which started in Canada, and on which you resolve to buy absolutely nothing for 24 hours – know that they are a drop in the demographic ocean that is Black Friday, Grey Thursday, Cyber Monday (which falls tomorrow) and all the rest of it.
In terms of the shopping wars Black Friday might yet turn out to be the Longest Day. Let’s just hope we all get what we wanted.