I've been away for a year, but this year the television is full of ads for Black Friday and websites are starting sales at midnight (Thursday into Friday) especially the electrical stores like Game and PC World. My inbox is full of British people offering me Black Friday discounts, what has happened? Are companies using it as an excuse to get income before Christmas? Log In
It's amazing how the slow creep of US-style retailing is making inroads into the UK. Growing up, the idea of such discounting before the Boxing Day sales (or even the New Year sales as it really was meant to be) was heresy. It was viewed as being in bad taste. But the world has changed. The cosy rip-off retail culture of certain franchises has been really put to the sword, thanks to the world of online retailing, the Poundlands of this world, and the Aldis. Everyone has to make more of an effort to get the consumer. Yes, consumers are a lot less willing to spend in the current environment but retailers are also waking up to a new reality. Thankfully.
I've also been away from the UK for just over a year. But before I left, I noticed that ever since the recession we seemed to have year round sales on the high street. They seemed to be at random times of the year and suddenly there didn't seem to be any rush to scramble for the January sales as much. -I'm inclined to believe stores like Aldi, Pound stores and Lidle are putting the bigger players under a lot of pressure, as the shame attached to shopping there has all but disappeared since the recession because everyone is watching the pennies.
I'm pretty sure Black Friday beat Boxing Day in terms of sales in 2014, and that's something that really didn't surpirse me at all. We generally do tend to adopt American events such as these pretty quickly, and the Black Friday deals within the UK had been coming on leaps and bounds in the past few years in general that I really thought this year might be the year that they take over Boxing Day & the January Sales. Seems that was the way.
We are getting more Americanised every year! Baby showers, engagement photoshoots and now Black Friday. Thankfully, we don't have quite the same amount of hysteria in the stores here, but there were still tens of thousands of people who were willing to queue in the cold for hours waiting for the stores to open in order to save £30 on a television. It is clearly a marketing ploy to get you to spend money at Christmas, and you can usually make similar savings at any time of the year simply by shopping around.
