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How Black Friday and Cyber Monday Are Losing Their Meaning (time.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Brad Tuttle reports at Money Magazine that while the terms "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" are more ubiquitous than ever, the importance of the can't-miss shopping days is undeniably fading. Retailers seem to want it both ways: They want shoppers to spend money long before these key shopping events, and yet they also want shoppers to turn out in full force to make purchases over the epic Black Friday weekend. When they use the "Cheap Stuff!" card day after day and week after week, the deals on any single day stop seeming special. Add to that the trend of manufacturers creating stripped-down versions of their electronics to sell on Black Friday, and consumers have less reason than ever to flood retail stores.
The true story behind Black Friday is not as sunny as retailers might have you believe. Back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Shoplifters would also take advantage of the bedlam in stores to make off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache. Sometime in the late 1980s, however, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the "red to black" concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America's stores finally turned a profit.
The true story behind Black Friday is not as sunny as retailers might have you believe. Back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Shoplifters would also take advantage of the bedlam in stores to make off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache. Sometime in the late 1980s, however, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the "red to black" concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America's stores finally turned a profit.
the sooner those preposterous feeding frenzies are history, the better.
.... and possibly for others who were in the area at the time who lost friends or family to the event, this is what I shall forever associate with "Black Friday": link.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"manufacturers creating stripped-down versions of their electronics" Good, as long as the spyware and useless crap is stripped out.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
These aren't days with any real significance other than the usual "quick, come buy shit".
It's not like these dates have any significance, and they're pretty much entirely fabricated by and for retail industries for their own benefit.
I've been hearing ads talking about "Black Friday Week Savings" ... whatever. It's just marketing hype and bullshit.
Yo Dawg, we hear you like sales, so we have a pre-sale so you can buy stuff while you're waiting for the sale where you can buy stuff before the next sale, for which we'll have a pre-sale and hype it even more.
Sorry, but just because corporations want a two month long shopping frenzy doesn't mean we need to care.
Stop buying shit you don't need because some asshole in marketing is telling you need to run out today and buy it. How did these clowns get everyone acting like trained fucking monkeys?
I'm so glad we've given up on the whole Christmas gift thing ... pretty much from before Halloween until middle of January it's one big, over-hyped retail cycle which has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING except corporate profits and pointless consumerism.
Losing their meaning -- what a pathetic statement.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"The only winning move is not to play." I'll take some R&R time in my PJ's with my wife and kid instead, thank you. Did Black Friday with an ex a decade ago, never again. Life's way too short to deal with that swirling vortex of negativity over stupid, needful things.
successive iterations of economic inflation, joblessness, and market crash have forced retailers constrained by 21st century economic mandate of 15% quarterly and yearly posted gains to in turn usher in a thousand years of sales regardless of whether they want to or not. In return customers have become so desensitized and indifferent to a sale that its only awkward when a local business or retailer somehow misses the memo and tries to open a shop to sell a product for the greater common good. if the toilet paper isnt on sale, there must be something wrong.
conversely these same boom-bust model economics of american capitalism have turned once savvy and spendthrift shoppers into deadpan holiday drones whos only real interaction with $holiday is to log predictably onto amazon, select an item from a prepopulated list of gifts for a known interest or loved one, and click buy. brick-and-mortar macys and nordstrom have been reduced to nothing more than an over-illuminated street corner inconvenience with mandatory christmas tree furiously blocking a pedestrian courtyard or an army of bell-bangers demanding what little spare change the average american hasnt carried for 20 years. yet still is the awkward post-christmas sales rush, an event thats gained momentum consistently for the last decade due to an increasing number of americans who are made to work holidays or multiple jobs in a service sector with no concept of regular time off.
raining grinch upon glad tidings still is a growing minority of americans who just wont. They hold contempt for christmas in october, the same five christmas songs played fifteen times a day for 3 months, the mind numbing tie-ins and product placement in even the most mundane entertainment medium, and the lack of diversity or meaning in a mandatory shopping experience spun from the backs of so many chinese cargo ship containers.
For me, I dont do black and cyber anything. When thanksgiving rolls around I buy something tasteful and local from my state to ship to relatives.
Good people go to bed earlier.
AliExpress/Alibaba have 365 black fridays a year, on the Chinese singles day (11/11) they sold stuff for 14 billion dollars on a single day, pardon the pun.
Now the mainstream media is going after BLACK FRIDAY. When will their War on Christmas end?
You are welcome on my lawn.
bingo.
My father was staying at my apartment for Thanksgiving weekend in 2005 when we went to the Wal-Mart store in Mountain View, CA. We got there at 6:30AM, an hour after the store opened for Black Friday. Counted 16 police cars in the parking lot and about as many cops inside the store. A stampede and a riot broke out over a pair of HDTV that were on sale. Meanwhile, I picked up a crockpot for $5.
Can't we all just get along? No.
Can't we just say that all Fridays matter?
Compiling your kernel again while trying to uninstall SystemD.
Letting him get out all over the rest of the year just ruins everything.
Big shopping events like sales or black friday do not make much sense in the information age.
Back then it was a way to manage supply. Now, everything is stream based, predictions are made to make sure that shops get the right amount of supplies. The result is that instead of a predictable pattern that resulted in special events, we are now left with random noise.
Shops now try to capitalize on the outdated shopping event concept by crafting special offers for it but people start noticing that it completely artificial (no real good deals) and lose interest.
There is an analog between how the Christmas holiday season keeps getting pushed earlier into the year vs the current disfunction of the economy as a whole. Both are attempting to compensate for poor performance by pulling forward whatever demand there is. For retail this means earlier and deeper sales. For the economy it means greater (and longer duration) fiscal and economic stimulus.
They've existed long enough to have a meaning?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU TRAMPLED COWS!!
Black Friday was the sacred Friday before Easter, on which Jesus was crucified. That is, until big business, in an act of cultural imperialism, decided the term should be used to dignify a celebration of materialism. Strange how Time conveniently overlooks cultural imperialism when directed against certain groups, but not others.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Boy, I so hate that term. It conotates everything that is wrong with this whole Black Friday thing.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Internet shopping has for the most part made brick-and-mortar shopping a thing of the past.
These deals are not so, you can normally find the same items with better prices online a week after black friday.
I'm done risking life and limb going into walmart at frickin 4am after turkey day.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
There hasn't been a Black Friday deal worth getting out of bed for since the late 1990s.
As soon as the media latched onto Black Friday as an "event" it started going downhill.
- Earlier hours
- Worse deals
- Fewer store exclusive deals
- Larger crowds (worse odds of getting a deal)
- Larger crowds (better odds of getting stabbed or trampled)
- Pervasiveness of deal sites facilitating hoarders and resellers
I've personally never found "Cyber Monday" to have anything worth getting, even in the 90s.
The proper way to shop is to know what you want and set up a deal alert on a forum like slickdeals (or even ask in the "find me a deal" forum).
If by chance you want something, such as PlayStation 4, you'll likely find a deal on it. If you can wait til Black Friday, buy it a couple of weeks BEFORE Black Friday and then use the price protection feature on your credit card (Discover IT and some others cover Black Friday prices, while others don't). You get it earlier, you're guaranteed to get it, and you don't have to fight anyone for it.
If you're looking at Black Friday ads to see what good deals there are, my advice is to look at some pornography instead. You'll save money and you'll be happier. For the past 15 years the bulk of Black Friday "deals" have gone through each of these trends:
- Cheap and shitty digital photo frames that are cheap because the market collapsed
- Cheap and shitty standalone GPS units that are cheap because the market collapsed
- Cheap and shitty net books that are cheap because the market collapsed
- Cheap and shitty eReaders that are cheap because the market collapsed
- Cheap and shitty Windows RT tablets that are cheap because the market collapsed (or never existed)
The next thing will be cheap and shitty Android tablets that are cheap because the market collapsed. Yes, Black Friday is filled with cheap and shitty Android tablets already, but the market hasn't collapsed yet.
These guys make up the next biggest portion of the deal space - cheap devices that are cheap because they're last year's model (or older) and they need to GTFO. From phones to tablets to GoPros to routers to whatever. A big chunk of the "deals" are wasted on shit that would have been sent back to the warehouse in a couple of months as unsellable.
Do you really want that 18 month old video card or that "new" 802.11n wireless router? Sure it's a bit cheaper than the current model's MSRP, but if you can wait a week you can probably get a deal on the current model to split the difference in price.
How about that printer? You just know that ink in the tiny starter cartridge is dried up and buying new ink will cost more than buying the current printer model.
The last major category of Black Friday "deals" are the turds. And boy do they polish these before they splash them all over your screen / newspaper inserts.
These are the fucking stripped down, Black Friday versions of popular brands. I'm talking about Samsung TVs which aren't made by Samsung and for which you'll never find a review because the SKU is unique to Best Buy.
These are the fucking off-brand pieces of shit you normally wouldn't touch with a 10 foot clown pole. I'm talking about 50" 720p Vizio TVs at Costco.
These are the "shoot yourself in the foot" old models like the XBOX 360s that are guaranteed to RRoD when the latest model is only $50 more.
These are the unsupported corpses that are barely functional in the modern world like old Rokus and DLNA boxes that can't handle 1080p or talk to your "smart" devices.
The next of the notable categories are smaller than the rest, but still deserve to be mentioned.
Trash. Near-literal fucking trash like fucking 4th world USB chargers, cases for phones nobody owns, U-Value DVD-R 16X (50-pk.), or an ancient plastic tub of red vines. These things are trash and pe
In addition to the already described points of "Black Friday" turning into "Black Week", and Amazon apps dinging us when there's a new deal we can swipe-left or swipe-right, the stores painted themselves into a bit of a corner - "up to 80% off!"...that thing that no one wants, ever. The things that are actually wanted are only 5% off. The $200 laptops...each store only gets three of them, so if you're dediated enough to be one of the first three in line, you might be lucky enough to get one, but stores stopped shipping reasonable quantities of doorbuster deals, so anyone who got up early and didn't get what they came for started saying "screw this" after the first few rounds of disappointment, finally coming to the realization that spending $20 more and having it shipped to them from Amazon was an infinitely better gamble than spending four hours freezing outside.
Black Friday used to be the day where it was possible to get actually good deals, but it got distilled until there was nothing left.
...when I last walked into any kind of store on Black Friday. It must have been at least 20 years ago. Occasionally I'll see something I'd like to give someone earlier in the year and buy it—I like doing that. Other than that, I shop when I am looking for something in particular, on no particular day. I really don't see why anything cares anything about what's going on during Black Friday except for those poor souls working retail. I do object to the junk retailers starting their sales on TG Day, only because I know most of the retail employees don't really have a choice of whether to work that day, and people deserve a day off in sync with their families, if they want it.
I live in a smaller community of about 6000 people. We have a Wal-Mart here and it of course gets lots of our money. But when it comes to Black Friday sales, the products they bring in seem to last until mid June. Last year they had three pallets of these 32" RCA TV's for only $125.00. It was a good deal if you could live with 720p and only 1 HDMI, 1 Composite and 1 PC connection. It also had a tuner but we don't get any OTA this far from the city. It took until June before there was only one pallet left and I think they finally put it in the back. We'll probably see that same TV out this year. People around here don't seem to fall for that whole black Friday thing. It's just another day in the middle of now where.
I would think it would be the inverse. Push sales when people have money to buy; don't push when people are broke, you'll just be wasting money. It's predicted this will be the most spendy season since before the crash.
They keep raising their prices and call it a "sale" hoping nobody notices, but apparently people know better because eventually it always goes back down to the old "sale" price anyway. They even tried jacking up the price, calling it a sale, and saying "limit 8/customer" and still you see huge pyramids of the shit sitting there until they go back to their old cheaper price. Fuck their mind games I'm just gonna go to Costco.
Whaddya mean "until mid June!?" There has been Black Friday BS since last July!! This poor marketing tactic has been ruthlessly had the life beaten out of it. There is nothing left. So I ignore all the "black" crap.
"In their quest to attract shoppers, stores will partner with big-name manufacturers to create "derivative models" — stripped-down versions of pre-existing TVs. These TVs, made specifically for Black Friday, are often not as good as the model they're based on: The picture may be lesser quality, or the warranty may be altered. There could be some missing features or components....... Most notably, Best Buy's model lacks smart TV features, and doesn't offer as many settings: It has just two different aspect ratios to choose from, while the non-Best Buy-specific version has six." Lacking smart TV features is a good thing.
> the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America's stores finally turned a profit. This myth always gets repeated, but is very wrong. Just look at any publicly traded retailer, and the profitable ones report a profit every single quarter, not just the fourth quarter.
... rarely does "sales".
I stoppd paying attention to Christmas, Easter, etc - even birthdays - many years ago exactly because of the commercialisation of it. The thought of gorging myself on food and drinks that I don't actually like, in the company of people that I mostly don't care about and wouldn't see at any other time, just doesn't appeal for some reason. Plus, of course, the frenzy to buy gifts that are mostly misplaced and unwanted. (Sorry, did that sound cynical?)
I very pointedly do not buy gifts for birthdays or Christmas; instead I buy useful things for people I want to give something special - my wife and children, mostly - on days throughout the year. My form of protest - childish, you might say, but that's how I stay young ;-)
Taxes consume more than 50% of income, these days. Imagine being able to be profitable in July, instead!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
We need some truth in advertising laws. One of which should be able advertised sale prices.
A sale isn't really a sale if the sale price is longer than the regular price. It really should be forbidden for a store to call it a "sale" or other similar words if the sale duration exceeds the regular price duration within let's say the past 90 days.
I also want disclaimers on TV ads to be up for three seconds, at readable font, or to be read like they are done on the radio.
It's not like they mark down most of the products they sell. I've been contemplating buying a NAS server so i don't have to have my desktop on all the time (gotta save on power bills somehow and I'm running out of storage space). I checked a month ago and a 3TB NAS HDD was trending at around $100+/-$5 (Amazon, Newegg, Ebay, etc.). Today is Cyber Monday and the price is at $99 with an "old price" of $159.99. Nonsense.