5 ms·

It has been interesting watching the concept of Black Friday (and cyber monday) evolve over the past 20 or so years from being mostly an "American big box retai

• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I live in slovenia. We literally have all-month black friday "deals".
  • colechristensen 5y ago
    In the US I was seeing things labeled as "Black Friday" in the middle of the summer.
    • cromka 5y ago
      Probably Lenovo?
  • el-salvador 5y ago
    Something similar happens in El Salvador. One retailer trademarked "Black Friday" so no other store can use it. This caused Black Friday to become Black November, Blue November, Red Weekend. I think we even have deals in September.
  • beebeepka 5y ago
    Steam sales lost all meaning years ago. It happens to everything that transitions from rare to usual
    • tpxl 5y ago
      They haven't lost meaning, you can still wait a bit to get your game cheaper. It does usually follow a pattern of: opening sale 10%, full price for a bit, seasonal sales 10-50%, eventually up to 90% off during seasonal sales.
      • beebeepka 5y ago
        Sure. But have you not noticed how the same, now oldish, games go on sale for the exact same amount for years and years? I can tell without looking that Cities: Skylines is sold for 6.99 euro. Or the latest Civilization game at 15 euro. Or bioshock infinite at 7.99 euro or so.
        • tpxl 5y ago
          What's the problem with that? Terraria has been on sales for 2$ for ages now, that doesn't mean it isn't a bargain to buy at that price instead of 10 or 12 that it is regularly.
          • beebeepka 5y ago
            No problem at all. It's just not special anymore. Do you not remember the first few steam sales? Everyone's mind was blown because there was nothing like it until that point
      • mordae 5y ago
        https://isthereanydeal.com https://isthereanydeal.com?
        • tpxl 5y ago
          Thanks!
  • sandos 5y ago
    In Sweden we have "black week" starting monday before black friday, then of course black friday, cyber weeked, cyber monday. Then there is any number of made-up things by various sellers too. Traditionally there is always a sale between christmas and new years, and basically all of January too. I think this year was not very common in that for example TVs had the same low price the entire week, usually someone has a lower price during just the friday but not for popular models this year.
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      Denmark it's the same deal. "Black Week/Month", mostly because at least for online retailers, stores don't want to deal with the high influx of customers on a single day. Personally I liked "Mellandagsrea" more than Black Friday back in the day. It was much more calm.
• pirate787 5y ago
  This take is wrong, Black Friday has always been about the beginning of the holiday shopping season, traditionally holiday decorations started the day after Thanksgiving and the doorbuster deals are loss leaders to drive traffic to stores. Source: middle age American. Also history: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/11/24/franskgiving-fdr-moved-thanksgiving/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/11/24/franskgivi...
  • ayngg 5y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean that what I said was the origin, only that was what it was marketed as around that period, and I should clarify my context that I was talking about what it was like in Canada, where it has only relatively recently become a thing. I guess what I meant to refer to was its etymological shift from the "selling excess stock" narrative in America (which itself was just a rebranding of the previous meaning) towards becoming a global event of consumption for consumption's sake in itself. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel like it has only been within the past couple decades that we have seen things marketed as black Friday outside of America, or sales co-opting the name for things like pre-black Friday sales, extended black friday sales and things like black Friday in summer.
    • salamandersauce 5y ago
      Yeah it wasn't really a thing in Canada when I was kid and Boxing Day was the big sale day. Wikipedia says it started here because we hit par with USD and retailers wanted to keep people from just doing all their holiday shopping in the U.S.
    • mulvya 5y ago
      > "selling excess stock" narrative in America That wasn't the narrative in 2002, my first Black Friday.
      • ayngg 5y ago
        Yeah you are right, it was more like getting into the black.
• julianlam 5y ago
  Sure, if you get caught up in the mania and hype of any particular "sale" and don't price compare then you're bound to get ripped off. I wouldn't dismiss singles day, though. There were some surprisingly cheap (both in price and quality) items I picked up on singles day. Got an AirPod clone for something like a dollar last year. This year I picked up a coffee grinder off the official retailer for Timemore on AliExpress. The official Canadian retailer charges a 100% premium on the product. No thanks, I'll wait for it to come on the slow boat. I waited for singles day and got it for another $10 off.
  • dougmwne 5y ago
    I used to chase these kinds of deals, but if you stop to think about it, spending hours to optimize for $10 is almost certainly a terrible waste compared to what you could have been doing with that time. Deal seeking always eats up many hours of time for these small gains. That analysis skill applied to any kind of business problem is easily worth thousands. No offense intended if this is pure stamp collecting.
    • cfjgvjh 5y ago
      That only works if the use of that time towards a more productive activity actually pays off in that short duration; sometimes comparing shops and making sure you're getting the best is the most fun part, so there's some utility derived from there as well. At least for myself, I only really deal-hunt during Black Friday and anytime else I get what I need when I need them.
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      I run an e-commerce business and see the opposite as well. People who earn, say, $30/hr won't take literally 2 seconds to scroll past the sponsored listings and save $50+.
      • executesorder66 5y ago
        How do you know the incomes of random people visiting your site?
• colechristensen 5y ago
  I remember the day after Thanksgiving being a day my relatives (at least the ones interested in shopping in malls, etc) being excited about going shopping. Lots of people had the day off, originally I think "black Friday" just meant that stores were really busy.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • surge 5y ago
    It literally meant the day stores would go into the "black" because many stores would be in the red for the year overall until they sold so much on that one day they'd turn a profit for the year or go into the "black" on their accounting.
    • staticman2 5y ago
      You are repeating a fairy tale some marketers invented to explain the black friday name. Black friday is a term for a day when something horrible ocurs, the term was applied to the day after thanksgiving by police in an american city because of the difficulty in maintaining crowd control and it caught on.
      • Dylan16807 5y ago
        If you're so certain your etymology is the right one, you should probably be able to name the city.
        • SapporoChris 5y ago
          Philadelphia and Rochester. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Origin_of_the_term_Black_Friday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Origin...
      • hermes8329 5y ago
        Well guess what? Language and terminology change over time While black Friday is a reference to a single day in history. It is also a reference to the annual shopping for Christmas. Which has also changed. It really was the start of the shopping season but alas, you cant stop change
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  To me there is two specific aspect of Black Friday that make it special for online shopping: - retailers are showcasing a limited number of goods that they expect to sell fast. This means short delivery times, no weird third party shipping from obscure places. They are prepared, and even buying at the same price as usual, the experience tends to be better. - the piling up effect makes it worse for delivery, worker conditions are probably worse, even if they get paid some amount more than usual. This makes it a very mixed bag, and I wish we had a better grip on the second point, to be able to fully appreciate the first one.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    > retailers are showcasing a limited number of goods that they expect to sell fast. I wonder how much of that is true and how much is just make believe.
    • makeitdouble 5y ago
      Anecdotally, last year a bit before Black Friday we wanted a new iPad (unrelated to the event, it just happened that way). Ordering directly from Apple had a 2 weeks delivery date, getting it from Amazon during Black Friday landed it 2 days after in front of our door. And it was cheaper (same price, but bigger storage)
• throwaway984393 5y ago
  [flagged]
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Just like how for singles day in Asia, retailers shamelessly just jack prices up beforehand to make their sale prices look like discounts. This would be illegal in Denmark https://www.forbrugerombudsmanden.dk/hvad-gaelder/markedsfoeringsloven/tilbud-og-udsalgspriser/tilbudspriser/ https://www.forbrugerombudsmanden.dk/hvad-gaelder/markedsfoe... English >If an item, for example, has cost DKK 1,000 throughout the year, and it is set up to DKK 1,500 for 6 weeks and then comes on “sale” for DKK 1,000 again, this is misleading, which is illegal. obviously you can do stuff like set the price up for a longer period to escape being illegal but then you probably have a bunch of stock sitting around that doesn't move. although as a general rule when I see black friday deals in Denmark I am not too thrilled at the savings, maybe because they tend to be realistic markdowns.
  • aembleton 5y ago
    Why would you need much or any stock? Just set the price to DKK 10,000. Then you don't need to carry much stock as no one will be buying and then advertise 90% off.
    • darkwater 5y ago
      But you are loosing sales the rest of the year and putting you into excessive stress during the black Friday period. Not a good strategy in my book.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure that would also fall under the laws regarding misleading the consumer, and also let's say I am a company that sells coffee makers - in order to do this tactic I have to choose a potentially sellable coffee maker and decide not to sell it for a longer period of time in order to make a potential killing on black friday at the same time when consumers checking prices on coffee makers on pricerunners and other tools see that you have a coffee maker that everyone else has for 1000 at 10000 and decide your company is lousy and not to want to buy anything from you?
  • hebrox 5y ago
    I just read somewhere last week that the The Netherlands would get a similar law. Searching for a link, I found out that its actually the European "New Deal for Consumers" package [0] [0]:https://leveranciers.bol.com/en/need-help/legislation/legislation-bol-com-2022/ https://leveranciers.bol.com/en/need-help/legislation/legisl...
• dghughes 5y ago
  I'm Canadian in 1999 I was in Scranton, Pa. for Thanksgiving and my friend said Black Friday tomorrow. I said what's that? She was shocked I didn't know about it. Back home it was unheard of since our Thanksgiving is in October. I didn't go to a store I headed home but now I wish I would have experienced it.
  • hihihihi1234 5y ago
    Until recently, Black Friday didn't exist at all in the UK, and I only knew of it from American TV. It's suddenly become a big thing here within the last ~5 years. This makes me said. (It's not our first American cultural import either. Halloween has been a thing in the UK for as long as I've been alive, but my parents' generation didn't grow up with it.)
  • smilespray 5y ago
    I'm sorry you had to spend Thanksgiving in Scranton.
    • dghughes 5y ago
      It was great I had a great time at the Genet's, had some Yugoslavian moonshine too. Alcohol is astonishing cheap in the US. Scranton reminds me a lot of Nova Scotia or more specifically Cape Breton (part of Nova Scotia). Coal, steel, and trains plus the lay of the land too.
• znpy 5y ago
  > It has been interesting watching the concept of Black Friday (and cyber monday) evolve over the past 20 or so years from being mostly an "American big box retailer dumping excess stock" thing to "oh boy its black Friday, time to go buy stuff!" This sounds like pump&dump with extra steps.