When discounts become a global sport

The world can’t resist Black Friday!

Cartoon: Ladysmith News

Much like Valentine's Day and Mother’s Day, two festivals India has adopted with suspicious enthusiasm, Black Friday too has quietly found a foothold in India.

For the uninitiated, it was yesterday, the last Friday of November, the day after Thanksgiving Thursday in the United States. Because most global retail giants are headquartered in the USA, their shopping rituals inevitably drift into our markets. Thus begins their unofficial kick-off to a nearly month-long Christmas shopping marathon.  

The name might puzzle you, black usually denotes sorrow, loss, and calamity, but here companies claim they spend the whole year ‘in the red’ and only on this miraculous Friday do they crawl ‘into the black’ with profits. No wonder they announce discounts so heavy they should come with a doctor’s note.

According to some historians, the first Black Friday in the US traces back to the financial crisis in 1869 when two financiers, Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to hoard gold, jack up prices, then sell for mountains of money. But President Ulysses E Grant asked the Treasury to release more gold, prices crashed, and the two would-be emperors of finance went bankrupt. Even the finances of the President’s brother-in-law, who was hand-in-glove with them, were destroyed.

Another popular theory goes back to the early 1960s, the Philadelphia police used the term Black Friday to describe the chaos caused by tourists, shoppers, and football fans crowding the city after Thanksgiving. The effort to rename it Big Friday fizzled out, apparently, the colour black won the popularity contest. The poor police force worked double shifts to keep crowds from knocking the life (and dignity) out of them.

But the version I prefer comes from The Engineering Magazine, which observed that workers in November 1951 and 52 often reported sick on Friday after Thanksgiving Thursday purely to get a long weekend.

And honestly, it makes sense. After a heavy family feast on Thursday, a fridge full of leftovers, and no need to cook, what else can one do? Watch games, or go shop? And what better time to launch a Christmas shopping spree than the long weekend?

None of the other explanations tempt the small, struggling, common-sense zone that God has marked out in my brain.

Of course, the retailers were not satisfied with only a Friday. Soon,  ‘doorbuster’ sales began on Thanksgiving evening, sometimes afternoon itself, ensuring that people could abandon their dinner in favour of heavily-discounted electronics.

Naturally the world followed. While Egypt and Libya rebranded the event as White Friday for cultural reasons, Pakistan calls it Blessed Friday, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia preferred a different colour- Yellow Friday. Europe too jumped into the frenzy: Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Romania, Poland and half their neighbours now enjoy the discount stampede, as do several countries in the Central and South America.

If you think shoppers wait patiently outside shops, forget it. In 2008, a Walmart employee, Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death in New York, when a 2000-strong crowd burst through the gates. Even the police were shoved aside and chaos won.

Every year, some brawl or fistfight makes the news, marking the rising of the Christmas spirit with a swing.

To ‘help’ shoppers who were too busy being thankful and making turkey an extinct species, the retailers then invented Cyber Monday, an online continuation of the discount fest. Electronics and fashion goods are hot selling items on Black Friday, returnable items like toys, books, clothes, make-up enjoy the position of glory on Cyber Monday.

Cartoon: The Providence Journal

“Do not worry, we’ve got your back”, promise retailers whether you prefer to shop from your easy chair, revolving chair or a brick-and-mortar store.

But if, like me, you treat shopping as a necessary, faintly unpleasant  chore, you would simply ignore the barrage of messages from Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, Zivame, Apple, Air India, Indigo, Croma, Adidas, Reliance Digital and the like. You will let Friday be just Friday, let Cyber Monday be the first day of the week, and preserve your sanity.

Black Friday has come and gone, thankfully taking its sale banners with it. Cyber Monday is getting ready to land, but I’ll still be unavailable.

So today, I’ll do what I always do: sink into my favourite chair, knit like one possessed, act deaf when Mani picks up the TV remote and raises the volume, while the house-help takes a long nap. Better still, I might step outside and enjoy the weather. Harsh winter is still days away, and I’d much rather spend my weekend in peace than wrestle over discounted prices of things I don’t even need.

                                                                                         -Anupama S Mani