How the kids are doing it today though is ya buy it, take it out. Replace and return for 100% savings and a whole mess left behind with Jo fucks given… thanks god I haven’t fallen victim. But I rarely buy online in general.
If the blob wants us to buy more stuff during the gray season, they should have a Black Friday sale on groceries & gasoline so we have enough money to shop for Christmas. ✌🏼
@@Ray-v4vBecause gas and groceries are things you actually need. Corporations would much rather persuade the public into buying junk they don't need in massive quantities than actually help making necessities more affordable.
Not even sales anymore they just increase the price then back again on Black Friday. At this point I just buy used but even then people are getting greedy there too
It's like when I told my mom I think light houses are pretty cool and so for the next 10 years I was bombarded with lighthouse themed gifts, lighthouse themed room, my grandma, cousins and aunts bought me lighthouse ornaments, shirts, books, posters. Anything that cast light into the sea they attempted to aquire for me. The only thing nobody ever did was show me an actual lighthouse. I've still never seen one in person. I didn't even like lighthouses all that much. I happened to like something one time and everyone just started throwing it at me all year long.
Love that he brought up how this sales tactic disproportionally affects those with impulse control issues, haven’t heard anyone really mention that argument
Frankly, as a person with ADHD, I don’t think it’s fair for society to hold my hand because of my issue. I just don’t go to Amazon on Black Friday. I don’t game anymore or watch anime much. Frankly, all I consume are books and fitness gear and supplements.
@@Darth_BatemanIsnt it? As someone else with ADHD who still struggles to actually get the darn medication, I can certainly paint an argument in favor. I certainly think it's fair and realistic to expect better from society, especially when considering the numerous mistakes we have made in defining rights and handling matters. If anything, despite the dreary nature of today, I truly think we can do better. We have all of known history to reflect on, and even prehistoric findings show that the social nature of humanity EXTENDS to the sick and disabled. Why shouldnt we expect better? Dont we have the capacity to be better? Why shouldn't we do more to look out for eachother?
@@humblemestizo5442 Fine. I just don't want this whole twitter-lefty approach to turning it into this giant thing where a bunch of other people start glamorizing it, and pretend to get offended when people don't hold their hands.
I agree with banning false price reductions and urgency tactics like countdowns to nothing. Yet any industry's top consumers are going to be those that interact with it in an unhealthy way. I don't know how you could ask any profit-minded entity to just leave that money on the table... for example the food industry's best customers will always be people who overeat. Any opinion on where the line should be drawn?
If you think "Christmas" is early in the USA you should travel to other continents. In Asian countries that have come under American an influence one can see hints of it as early as September.
Same, I felt bad for the workers. Plus, there was no way I was getting any "door busters" because I wasn't ruining my Thanksgiving to save money on a TV.
Yes! The greed was on full display at that point. I was working in retail during this time and nothing would piss me off more than to hear customers tell us “oh we hate you have to be here instead of with your families” like if you truly felt like this, why are you here?! We never got enough traffic to justify being open on thanksgiving either.
no literally that. at least when they limited it to friday there was still some smoke and mirrors. as soon as they were like “we’re giving you the deals early (; this year” i was immediately turned off by any and all of it
And now you have no excuse to get away from the family dinner you never wanted to go to anyways so who really won here? I say bring back thanksgiving black friday and add a Christmas one for good measure.
A colleague of mine was looking for a refrigerator. It was priced at around 420€, shortly before black friday it went up to 500€. Now, for ,,black Friday-week'' it is ,,discounted'' to 460€. It even came in the Radio, that people should watch out of fake discounts because companies know that people will buy anything with a discount-tag on it Good video btw!
im constantly checking under "sale" "low price" tags, the like, and have for years. it is amazing how much typically is not actually a discount, but the same price or even an increase. so i can only imagine this with something that isnt discounted food or clothes.
This is one of the reasons why it's good to keep an eye on something you want or like way early on instead of waiting for the black Friday discounts to hit because it's very easy to fall for the discounted tag. Even with that law enforced in Europe it still happens.
I worked at a toy store freshman year on Black Friday when Furbies were popular. I had never heard of Black Friday before then. I can tell you the media isn’t exaggerating. I watched a woman bite another woman’s hand so she would let go of her Furby. Then her son picked it up and ran. I left the store 2 weeks later.
Like 2017. Walmart in a Small town in remote new mexico My coworker was the 3rd person in line to buy a super cheap tv. They only had 40tvs 1st person buys one. Second person buys 39 tvs. Apparently there wasnt a strict policy of so many to a customer. She was the owner of a small local hotel and was buying them for her rooms. People were furious. They had to get security to walk her to her car. Couple days later he read someone broke into the hotel and stole 38 of the 39 tvs and left a note saying something like dont be so greedy
I was working Costco, the front door when Furbies were big. And I can concur there were all out fist fights. Knock down people, grab & run was the norm. One day it was an old woman who got knocked over...... absolutely unbelievable sh*t
@@Elhastezy888 I remember hearing about something like that Furby fight! It was insane! I also remember when the tickle me Elmo was going around too, people had absolute brawls over that stupid thing!
In high school, I remember going to the mall with a friend on Black Friday just to watch people frantically shopping. It was a spectator sport for us. This was in the late 1980s, before the rise of Big Box stores. The local news channels would always send reporters out to the local malls to get footage of people behaving badly: trampling each other as the stores opened, fighting one another for the last of a hot item. So the Black Friday phenomenon started a little earlier than mentioned here. It definitely escalated in the 1990s, but was definitely a thing in the 80s.
I like calling it a sport. Yeah going to the Mall on Friday morning after Thanksgiving to get the Christmas shopping done at least as much as possible then getting the heck out! I could get out by 11am. Prided myself on my speed at which i got through my list. Now it’s just muddled crap. Dragged out from the beginning of Nov till Christmas. Sad.
Yup, the Big Thing of the '80s was something my dad participated in. He went out on Black Friday 1983 to get me a Cabbage Patch Kid for Christmas. He is an imposing figure, so he had no trouble getting his hands on one. Later, he told how he watched people going at each other and even stopped another man from trying to grab a CPK from a petite woman.
I HATE Black Friday... As an online retailer, we don't offer any extra discounts or sales lower than we run throughout the year. Typically, in August, we start getting phone calls asking us what our Black Friday deals will be. By October and November our sales start really declining. Then Black Friday - Cyber Monday, we make pretty much all of our sales for the month in that one weekend, making it a horrible week of work for a months worth of orders to be processed. By the end of it all, we end up with an average month.
I remember when we started really calling it Black Friday in stores in the early 90s. It had nothing to do with stores going into the black, we called it that because it really really sucked to deal with the crowds on the first shopping day of the holiday season. I’m sure it’s one of those terms that was coined over and over in different places. But I feel like the whole “it’s about stores finally making a profit” is a retroactive attempt to make the term more acceptable to the suits and ignore the folks in the trenches.
Damn, I don't remember the phrase 'Black Friday' being used until 2003 or so. Before that, it was always 'Day after Thanksgiving sale'. It may be a regional thing, I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest
@@DonnaDoveWinters This wasn’t used in ads or anything, it’s just what we called it to each other on the sales floor here in Minnesota. I worked at Best Buy from 1992 through 1995 at a couple of different stores. Lemme tell you, though, that day was _nothing_ like the insanity we’d see in the 00s and 10s. Busy, frustrating, and awful to work yeah but I don’t recall having that many more people than usual waiting to get in when we opened (there was almost always a few folks waiting to get in on weekends).
I remember the term Black Friday coming on the scene in the 90s, too. I had to do with retailers making their biggest profit margins the day after Thanksgiving.
I worked in a Target distribution center for twenty years and was working 60 hours from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve. Thanksgiving and Black Friday were always rough. As I drove to work I would pass the stores with people lined up waiting for the stores to open. Now that I'm retired, I still won't go out on Black Friday.
I was a Friday night mall rat in the early 2000s. We loved Black Friday because the mall stayed open till midnight so we didn't have to leave. We weren't interested in buying anything, just hanging out and watching the chaos.
I used to love it as a kid too but now seeing Christmas decor at the beginning of October and emails as early as late October. I remember looking forward to the day after to check out the stores. It’s just amazing how this really ramped up around the year COVID started. I think people also have anxiety with getting the “perfect gift” so they want to get it over with. I’m just annoyed and want to somehow burn my email app so I can stop getting these emails. Everyone is broke.
Ugh it's the worst. In Australia it's out of hand just as much. I've worked in retail during a Christmas period. What a fkn joke! People just rush in...they don't even know what they're there for.
I bitched from the moment in October i saw the first Christmas item for sale to anyone who had ears. Most agreed. It ruined the holiday. Finally in November i talked about the Easter displays coming out the following week. I guess this is the new normal…. We gotta just suck it up.
I just got myself a new drawing tablet to use for my iMac , Bluetooth haha I'm a artist .. however I dont want to feel guilted in buying someone a Christmas gift for Christmas .. shit gets expensive.
The start of the decline for me was when retailers started creating special SKUs for black friday deal items. This had the dual effect of enabling them to sell cheap versions of nicer things that you might want to get on sale, and making it harder to look up items to research whether they were worth having, because no one had them to review prior to the sale.
I work in retail in the UK. There was a brief moment when Black Friday was a thing here where people went crazy for a TV or just bought into the whole "It's Black Friday so it must be a good deal" thing. I recall as the weeks passed and we got closer to Christmas there was confusion as to why things were quiet. It didn't take a genius to figure out we had just brought peoples purchases forward, they didn't just buy more stuff. I still see BLack Friday being advertised but it's a half hearted effort and I don't think people really care.
I feel like most people have an overspending problem these days, myself included. And you're right, it's because advertisers use behavioral psychology to manipulate us more and more. They really rely on the sense of urgency and FOMO with these little countdown timers and labeling things as "low stock" when they might not be at all. It's all madness, and I'm really glad that Black Friday has chilled out. With it being extended to about 2 months of time with "deals" that feel more like a typical price, it does make it less enticing. It also doesn't ironically overshadow Thanksgiving anymore, or cause the same aggressive behavior. Black Friday at its peak was the most toxic display of excessive consumerism I've ever seen.
I also believe the pandemic made FOMO and the sense of urgency worse because we are still coming out of a trauma of not finding anything in the grocery stores and supermarkets and we feel the need to buy something we don't need or might already have in the house.
honestly this is why i don’t ever want to buy things. i only want things recommended to me by a person i know who has tried the product and still liked it AFTER the hype died down
I've noticed a trick one of the companies I generally like uses is in their "hot deals" page, which is just where they buy a stock of an item once and sell it until it sells out, when an item has been listed for a long time because they can't sell it they'll tag "BEST SELLER!" on it to try to tempt people who don't know how the deals page works into buying it 🤦♂️
It's the mentality of never being satisfied...putting into practice, the philosophy that "things always need to get bigger and better". The NFL is another good example of this.
I actually miss what a true “Black Friday” shopping day with good deals was like. It’s so watered down, and the discounts aren’t even good anymore! It’s not even worth going out ON Black Friday. Loved this video!!
I sometimes have problems overspending.. but lately.. I’m so sick of seeing “Black Friday deals”, i go online and nothing looks like an actual deal anymore. Prices are still too high
Never participated in Black Friday sales after my introduction to it. Traffic was unbearable, parking was nonexistant, & the prices were artificially inflated the month prior & reduced back to their normal price to give the illusion of a sale. But the past year or two, it has become the best day to grocery shop with the best parking & the best traffic, because everyone stayed home.
Very good thoughts and points. Black Friday is a shell of itself all because capitalism couldn’t be content with having a weekend for deals. They’re just extending BF to a whole month nowadays with a couple of awful deals on the actual BF day. Worked in electronics retail and they’ve been doing this for years now.
That's exactly it. For me BF is jeans day. I feel like I have unintentionally been tracking BF because every year I buy at least one pair of jeans since my senior year of HS 2009. I can say the deals were steadily getting better until the late 2010s when I could easily find Levi's, CK or American Eagle jeans for more than 50% off, but the last 4-5 years those deals have slowly disappeared. I begrudgingly bought one pair of jeans last year for like 15% off , and this year for the first time i didn't even bother.
Great video! I always wondered why black friday never included groceries, things you NEED, not just random shit. Its highly disappointing. Grey season is the best term ive ever heard for black friday. It does feel pretty sad now. Hope your channel blows up, i was expecting this video to have thousands of views, i didnt realize till i reached the comments tht youre not nearly appreciated enough. Im sure you'll reach that appreciation quickly!
As someone who works in a grocery store, it’s already crazy the week of Thanksgiving with everyone buying for holiday meals. Then it will be the same for Christmas. We need a little break in between the two.
I suppose the reason is people would buy it anyway. Plus if they are routinely buying something and see the discount is higher than regular price it looks bad. The correct question should be why are the quality items never a deal. I can get better deals on Christmas stuff and other supplies right before Christmas.
@@sierrarmcclain That's a big part of why sales are on TVs. People don't buy them as much and they go out of date pretty quickly to be replaced with the new thing. So there are always a ton left unsold from the year that retailers want to get rid of.
It's like in Elmo Saves Christmas, when Elmo made it Christmas every day, people got tired of it because it wasn't special anymore. Black Friday deals all month, or even more often than that takes away the special nature it had. Not that there aren't any companies that still stick to the actual day.
My mom's lifelong hobby is bargain shopping; I spent countless hours with her thrifting, haunting discount outlets, factory sales, etc. For us, Black Friday was kind of the Shopper's Holiday. The stores were trying to give offloading excess inventory a Sense of Occasion, and we were happy to scoop up deals. Some time during the rise of fast fashion and disposable goods in the late 90s and early 00s, the goods got so much worse and cheaper in general, it just wasn't worth bothering. Everything is always available online, everything comes from the same pool of low cost manufacturers, no matter the brand name. If I want a doughnut maker I can wake up at 3am and demand one on my phone. Goods have no meaning, we are drowning in them. Black Friday is no longer my way to affordably score a really beautiful slightly out of season designer dress, or a quality piece of electronics; it's just more pop up ad noise. TL:DR - I'm old and nothing is good anymore, and I miss shopping uphill both ways in the snow. Thank you.
I had a colleague whose mom used to work for purchasing for Macey’s and she said the better deals are in early October or mid December. They said that while stores may have a few actual “big deal” items she said they (retailers) actually ever so slightly start inching the price up starting in mid-October so when it gets to be Black Friday and they discount the product by 50% it is only 25% or less.
The sales genuinely have gotten worse. It's common practice now to inflate the price and then "discount" it back to what they normally mark it as. You save zero money.
yeah I get sooooo many notifications form amazon in the weeks after black friday that something i put in my "saved for later" dropped in price by 10% then another 5% then 1.5% until it steadies out at what it was sold for on black friday. It's pretty much been par for the course for quite a few years now at least
Finally someone said it. Since your channel is about criticizing marketing, could you talk about ad placement? Specifically wtf they were thinking when they came up with “our ad will interrupt their content/video/song. That will surely make them want to buy the thing.” As a consumer, that really induces a rage response and makes me 0% likely to buy their thing. Or why huge companies (coke, mcd, etc) still bother advertising at all. Like, nobody is on the fence about that product line or establishment; everyone has made up their mind on whether they’ve chosen to get addicted to those products or not. I’m just wondering why they even need to advertise anything at all. I don’t imagine they’re getting much new business from advertising, they’ve already got their current consumers locked down, and nobody doesn’t know and needs to be informed about the existence. So what are they doing? Why advertise at all when you’re that well-known? Or what about a video on the fake virtue-signaling companies do? Like is it just a front because it’s cancel-able if you don’t (pride month for example)? Does anyone take commercials or marketing seriously? How?? Great content. Edit: spelling
I think it has something to do with it being noticeable. You don't remember any of the ads bookending something, but if an ad's entire slot on its own is enough to piss you off, youre more likely to remember the ad
@@boojersey13 yeah but I’m never going to convert that memory into a sale. Completely pointless. Like, I’ve made up my mind about products and services, and I buy everything based on need rather than suggestibility. I just don’t see the point in commercials. They just ruin my content experience.
@jarfullofgravity I'm the type to research a product for days or weeks before purchase. Adds aren't for people like us. They're for people whose lives are chasing emotions.
Coke and other huge brands like that still advertise cuz its good for brand awareness. You'd be surprised how many people buy things just cuz of name recognition
I worked 4 Black Fridays at different stores in my local mall at the end of high school and into college. They were the worst days of the whole year at work. The absolute worst comes out of people for deals on the dumbest crap. And the mess that came from it lasted for days.
I remember this weird thing where my first employer (1999-2003) had a standing policy that "you will not refer to it as Black Friday, and you can be fired for saying that". How weird it was to see it marketed so hard after that experience.
My favorite is when a retailer would have TVs specially made for black Friday with inferior materials and parts to look like an existing model so they can sell it as what would have been list price for the quality you get. If you look at the model number you'll see that it never existed before Black Friday.
Now some stores do this bs " Christmas in July" thing. I worked at a retail chain store that did this for 4 years and I always thought it was so stupid.
15:14 One of the best life advice my parents gave me is to not have a credit card, only debit. It forces me to think about my necessities and how I actually spend my money. Because credit cards are basically a scam, if you don’t have the money now, you most likely won’t have it later so there is no point in risking a debt to anyone, especially a bank.
Lmao y’all really are dumb. The point of a credit card is to use it when you DO have the money for some thing and then you immediately pay off your balance when it comes due so you can build your credit for free with no risk. what people always mess up, Is they use it when they don’t have the money and then they don’t pay it off and they get raked over the coals but if you always pay the balance in full, you never face any extra costs and you build your credit for free. That is unless you get a credit card that has a bunch of bull crap fees but if you go to a credit union, you should be good.
Thank you for the empathy -- I have a real problem with overspending when I feel vulnerable, as a dopamine-seeking behaviour... videos like yours help remind me to think with my logical, psychologically literate mind, as opposed to my emotional urges.
It’s not the interest of private companies, but of the investor class. The constant push to growth leaves most corporations in crumbles, but the investor class externalizes the losses of collapse but reap the profit that comes from the growth of new companies that come to replace the old.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but I think spreading out Black Friday over a week or even a month is a good idea. 1) It lightens the load on retail employees. 2) It’s safer for shoppers. 3) It allows supplies to cycle through with more ease, creating more sales (because employees can actually stock in time and make it presentable) thus boosting the economy. I don’t think this is sad at all. Black Friday is hell for a lot of people so the stretch is honestly a relief.
Not to mention it allows people with less income to actually participate. I cannot count the amount of times when I worked a shitty job going "Wow that sale is amazing! Too bad I won't have any disposable income for another five days!" and then it's gone in two days. Scooped up by all the middle classers who seem to always have money no matter how bad the economy gets.
This would be great if some retailers actually stocked their sale product all season long. The one I work for only sends my location 80% core products and 20% fashion. Only fashion goes on sale and we are always low in stock on those items. Our bigger stores had tons of sale products left for Black Friday whereas my shop only had two small sections (4-foot hang bars) of product left. I had 2 sale signs in the whole store. We did better with those singular big sales than we have in any of the last three "stretched" sale seasons. This was because even core products were discounted for a day or two.
Aa former retail employee it doesn’t lighten shit. The whole season lasting longer prolonged my suffering. I had to put out Christmas shit in October and the store was staying open later for just as long. Instead of a sprint it’s a bunch of back to back marathons. First back to school then halloween then black friday then the endless hell of christmas. It sucks.
I still find it appalling that the blob saw the terrible behavior of the public on black friday, this example being breaking down doors and entering the shops, and decided to capitalize it and turn it into a new buzzword called "doorbusters"
The death of it for me was when I worked at a sporting goods store. The first year, we opened at 3AM, but the competition opened at 1AM. The next year, we opened at midnight. The third year, we opened at 5PM on Thanksgiving day so that we’d be open before our competition. Until that point, Black Friday had been, to me, the day my dad would get up early and go buy new work boots. Money was so tight for us that buying new boots during the normal year meant we had to do without something that month. Being at work thanksgiving day to watch people get in fistfights over fishing gear, firearms, and go carts taught me that Black Friday didn’t mean the same thing to other people. I looked forward to it because it meant we could finally get some things we needed.
This doesn't even address that electronics manufacturers are manufacturing lower quality products to sell exclusively during black Friday sales. With the discounts being so deep, retailers don't want their loss leaders to lose them too much money, and so the manufacturers are using lower quality panels (for TV's) and internal electronics to make these wildly underpriced devices sellable at such a low price without the retailer losing money on the deal.
Great video! I've never liked black friday, it just never feels worth it, but I've had the same feeling of dissapointment in other holidays that have lost their meaning over time for me
I have a happy relationship with Black Friday. My locally owned upscale pet supply store does have some great deals on preserved chews and frozen raw food and treats, which is the extent of my shopping. It's busier than normal, but folks who shop there are all pretty civilized and well-mannered. The rest of the day, my day job is at a large regional animal shelter, and we have free or discounted adoptions on all primarily black animals, and it's usually very successful! 😊 My fiancée and her mother hit the box stores, and I do NOT envy them.
I feel like the deals are nowhere near as good! I used to have a fun time participating in Black Friday in high school with my siblings, mostly because it's fun to go to the mall and get starbucks at 5am, it feels surreal! But it was also a great time to restock on makeup as everything I needed to restock on for the year would be discounted. Now, there are no 'straight' discounts, and instead you need to buy a bundle or a box set to get any kind of "deal". It's just greedy and wasteful and not worth it at all anymore.
I'm in Australia where we don't even have Thanksgiving & it was really Amazon finally coming here in 2017 that pushed Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. Other retailers had to compete & now it's a grown into a 2 week retail event. Most people here wouldn't even know it's associated with Thanksgiving. Just a sale! Marketing at its finest..
Black Friday in Australia also means a totally different thing: 13th January 1939 was one of Australia's worst bushfires which killed 71 people, it was called Black Friday. So Black Friday sales are seen by many as both tasteless and pointless, which might explain why retailers keep trying, but they aren't making any more money or extra sales on Black Friday in Australia than they do on any other normal day of the year.
@@grandmothergoose Great point! I'd forgotten about that I'm ashamed to say. All I used to think when I heard Black Friday. We used to have remembrance at school for Black Fri, Ash Wednesday. Now when I hear black friday I just think of the sales. Wow 🤔
With every company trying to "outdo" the others, it has become a giant mess. I used to like Black Friday but it is not even worth it since it practically runs all month long. Once I went to Black Friday at one store and then decided to go to another store for their deals only to realize this other store started their "Black Friday" a few days early and all the "good deals" were sold out. It is just not fun anymore.
I just came across this video naturally and I’m so glad I did! I love your style, the delivery, the natural-ness, the critique, this character of “the blob”. Your content is exactly what I’ve been looking for for years now! Keep it up!
Went to Circuit City Black Friday sale In 2007. Got there around 5am and didn’t get in the door until around 11am, 6 hours later. Then it took so long to get any help and check out, I didn’t get out of there until 2pm. The hunger and sleep deprivation helped me make irrational decisions and spend way too much. Bought a bunch of stuff with mail in rebates and some of them didn’t work. Got a free printer I didn’t need but there are so manny given away it was worthless on EBay and it sold for cost of shipping only. In the end, it was one of the most regrettable events of my life.
Thank you for making this video touching on many different aspects of consumerism.Americans are hit with a never ending barrage of ads and commercials aimed at making us feel we absolutely have to get their products or we are incomplete. That combined with a 'keeping up with the Joneses'''mentality has resulted with so many people being woefully in debt, using credit cards that will keep them poor to feed their needs for useless stuff. Great video
I worked retail in ~2013 and I feel like it also started to go downhill when the stores started opening earlier and earlier. Ours started opening on Thanksgiving evening, and it seemed like a LOT less people came bc they were spending time with family. There was also less foot traffic later in the night and I think it was because people assumed the really good deals would be gone if they didn't show up when the doors opened. Either way, it made me miss Thanksgiving with my family that year.
Subscribed. I just did a bunch of online shopping and for the items I wanted very few of them were even on sale. I think I should have just bought the items when I wanted to get them originally.
While Black Friday has been wheezing for the past few years, inflation has been its ultimate suffocation. As a pastime I enjoy deal-hunting year around, and everywhere from Harbor Freight to Best Buy, seeing an actual bargain is a real rarity these days. Even when inflation adjusted (20% since 2019), discounted prices often remain higher than retail prices. I'm pretty confident this BF will be a non-event. However as the effects of high interest rates ripple through the economy, I expect to see the tide turn back around in the coming year as consumers demand more bang for their buck again.
(13:10) At least for PC parts, pcpartpicker has a price history graph for a number of retailers. It's a shame Amazon isn't one of those listed, but you can compare against competitors and competitor histories that way.
Great video. Thank you for mentioning about some "regular" prices being marked up and the "sales" price is actually the regular price. I've seen it myself in a big box store. How I caught it was I had known the usual price for some of the things in the store and noticed the price on a "sale" day. It totally discussed me. I've never been a shopper on black Friday or any other day like it (here in Canada we have a boxing day sale as well) as I'm usually stretched for cash (which in my opinion is a safe thing during these "sale" times and it helps me to prioritize where I put my money.)
From the standpoint of a former retail manager, I was always told "Black Friday" was significant because that was the last date that we could order a restock of products in time for Christmas. At a toy store, that was a big deal and our sales focused on making room for that last minute inventory. In an era of last minute shipping, that might have changed.
Once again I'm reminded to be thankful that I come from a healthy family where even though my dad and I have opposite political beliefs we still like each other and all of my siblings.
I think one of the most obvious trends is the Stanley cup. Functionally no different than the cups we all already have. And yet all of those influencers have one of those monstrous cups they hold in every video
I run a store in Second Life (yes, it still exists, and has lots of people still on in it) and "Black Friday" this year has started like a week early. I saw tons of stores start their Black Friday sales a whole week early. What the hell?
It's because people have very, very, VERY little money to spend on anything other than what's necessary. They are going to be watching like hawks for the 1 or 2 things they have to have and ready to grab it and they are done. Stores are gambling on what essential items must be replaced and selling them for BF deals earlier than the next competitor.
Fun intro to the channel! I remember in middle/high school when stores started opening on Thursday and everyone started taking a step back on their own, in their own time. I almost wish I had been a bit older to enjoy the hype and yet I know it’s better I didn’t because no one’s really NEEDS a misdemeanor charge for assaulting someone over a sale 😅😅
Amazing production value on the video: great job. One point: we had "Black Friday" concept in Poland where I live but we very quickly arrived to the point you are now couple of years ago. Since in Poland we don't celebrate Thanksgiving there was no real reason for having the deals on The Actual Friday. So it stuck to Friday for like 2 years and it quickly evolved into night shopping events, then "Black Week" and since like 3-4 years it's actually called Black Month with different deals on each day. This year they actually had Grey Month event in April with the same ad layouts from last year's Black Friday reused. It's riddiculous :D
1: Screw being shoved around in Best Buy by unbathed philistines for 45 minutes to save $20 on a PlayStation. 2: Screw the prices being out of this world inflated the other 364 days. 3: Screw brick and mortar stores for blaming shoppers for their high rent. They signed the lease. We need insulin and shelter more than our billionaires need more of our money.
You deserve more subs! I'm proud to be subscriber #69 :3 Black Friday wasn't a thing at all here in the UK until a few years ago when it came sailing over from the US on the good ship Amazon. Now it's everywhere, but people here don't really seem to care that much, unless they were looking to buy something specific and wait to see if it goes on sale. Perhaps it is because we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so it is just a random Friday near Christmas for us. Or maybe the blob already sucked it dry before it got here. Keep up the great content!
As someone who has worked in retail for not even that long (just over a year now), knowing other people who have worked for longer have described it as being a hellish weekend to a hellish month instead and I can relate, I work with a 4 man skeleton crew for online orders at slowes and it is honestly the worst work I see myself doing, pulling 10-12 hour days 5-6 days a week and calling a 15k step day light work has got me so worn down I can't even muster up the energy to do any paperwork for going to school, I just crash and burn at this point.
I was a retail clerk at the old Montgomery Wards the year Furby came out. The moment shoppers ascended the escalator to the floor I was on and running to my department to grab one is etched in my memory. Just surreal.
Remember, you save 100% on things you don't buy!
That's how I do it.
How the kids are doing it today though is ya buy it, take it out. Replace and return for 100% savings and a whole mess left behind with Jo fucks given… thanks god I haven’t fallen victim. But I rarely buy online in general.
😂😂😂
My dad always says this 😭
FR
If the blob wants us to buy more stuff during the gray season, they should have a Black Friday sale on groceries & gasoline so we have enough money to shop for Christmas. ✌🏼
Genius
I would actually go shopping on black friday if they promised to put the fresh produce on sale...
Funny and true! I’ve never seen ads for gas stations having Black Friday sale! Or grocers either.
@@Ray-v4vNo, but I have seen an ad (tongue in cheek) for pumpkin spice brake pads.
@@Ray-v4vBecause gas and groceries are things you actually need. Corporations would much rather persuade the public into buying junk they don't need in massive quantities than actually help making necessities more affordable.
The sales suck and our wages are stagnant. No reason to go into debt for out of date technology they want to get rid of.
Not even sales anymore they just increase the price then back again on Black Friday. At this point I just buy used but even then people are getting greedy there too
My parents never went shopping on Black Friday to avoid chaos. Once I was old enough to go by myself, the sales were shit.
My family never did shop on Black Friday, you'd see on the news how people would die in the chaos
Being a kid that was hopelessly broke and finally being able to afford Skyrim on an 80% off Black Friday deal is my only fond memory of the holiday
That was a good deal!!
Yeah I got some Kingdomhearts games for super cheap because of Black Friday I was so happy.
It's like when I told my mom I think light houses are pretty cool and so for the next 10 years I was bombarded with lighthouse themed gifts, lighthouse themed room, my grandma, cousins and aunts bought me lighthouse ornaments, shirts, books, posters. Anything that cast light into the sea they attempted to aquire for me. The only thing nobody ever did was show me an actual lighthouse. I've still never seen one in person. I didn't even like lighthouses all that much. I happened to like something one time and everyone just started throwing it at me all year long.
This was exactly me, but with owls lol.
Yes never say you like something, you will never see the end of it.
This is what the online shopping algorithm does. Look at an item once and it bombards you wherever you go. 🙄
LMAO
The exact same thing about lighthouses happened to my grandma. And she had a thing about never getting rid of a gift, so they just piled up.
Love that he brought up how this sales tactic disproportionally affects those with impulse control issues, haven’t heard anyone really mention that argument
Frankly, as a person with ADHD, I don’t think it’s fair for society to hold my hand because of my issue.
I just don’t go to Amazon on Black Friday.
I don’t game anymore or watch anime much.
Frankly, all I consume are books and fitness gear and supplements.
@@Darth_BatemanIsnt it? As someone else with ADHD who still struggles to actually get the darn medication, I can certainly paint an argument in favor. I certainly think it's fair and realistic to expect better from society, especially when considering the numerous mistakes we have made in defining rights and handling matters.
If anything, despite the dreary nature of today, I truly think we can do better. We have all of known history to reflect on, and even prehistoric findings show that the social nature of humanity EXTENDS to the sick and disabled. Why shouldnt we expect better? Dont we have the capacity to be better? Why shouldn't we do more to look out for eachother?
@@humblemestizo5442 Fine. I just don't want this whole twitter-lefty approach to turning it into this giant thing where a bunch of other people start glamorizing it, and pretend to get offended when people don't hold their hands.
I agree with banning false price reductions and urgency tactics like countdowns to nothing. Yet any industry's top consumers are going to be those that interact with it in an unhealthy way. I don't know how you could ask any profit-minded entity to just leave that money on the table... for example the food industry's best customers will always be people who overeat.
Any opinion on where the line should be drawn?
As someone with autism, this is painfully true
I could not agree more. Corporations are trying to make Christmas a two month holiday skipping Thanksgiving.
Only 2 months? I swear to god our local stores are trying to start Christmas in September and have it last till the day after New Year's.
@@leifmeadows3782 Walmart started their Black Friday early in October.
If you think "Christmas" is early in the USA you should travel to other continents. In Asian countries that have come under American an influence one can see hints of it as early as September.
@@answerman9933 Now that’s early for sure 😮
@@leifmeadows3782 Well, the 12th day of Christmas, traditionally, is Jan 6th
What killed Black Friday for me was when stores started to open on Thanksgiving. That point it went to far.
Same, I felt bad for the workers. Plus, there was no way I was getting any "door busters" because I wasn't ruining my Thanksgiving to save money on a TV.
Totally jumped the shark
Yes! The greed was on full display at that point. I was working in retail during this time and nothing would piss me off more than to hear customers tell us “oh we hate you have to be here instead of with your families” like if you truly felt like this, why are you here?! We never got enough traffic to justify being open on thanksgiving either.
no literally that. at least when they limited it to friday there was still some smoke and mirrors. as soon as they were like “we’re giving you the deals early (; this year” i was immediately turned off by any and all of it
And now you have no excuse to get away from the family dinner you never wanted to go to anyways so who really won here? I say bring back thanksgiving black friday and add a Christmas one for good measure.
As a former retail worker, I’m very happy about the decline of Black Friday. We were forced to work at midnight till 8am. It was freaking insane.
A colleague of mine was looking for a refrigerator. It was priced at around 420€, shortly before black friday it went up to 500€. Now, for ,,black Friday-week'' it is ,,discounted'' to 460€.
It even came in the Radio, that people should watch out of fake discounts because companies know that people will buy anything with a discount-tag on it
Good video btw!
I got a notification that something on my wishlist is on sale today but it actually costs the same as when I put it on there!
im constantly checking under "sale" "low price" tags, the like, and have for years. it is amazing how much typically is not actually a discount, but the same price or even an increase. so i can only imagine this with something that isnt discounted food or clothes.
This is one of the reasons why it's good to keep an eye on something you want or like way early on instead of waiting for the black Friday discounts to hit because it's very easy to fall for the discounted tag. Even with that law enforced in Europe it still happens.
I bought a power bank for my phone for like $10 and saw it "discounted" to $15 on Black Friday
The real deals are in January!
I worked at a toy store freshman year on Black Friday when Furbies were popular. I had never heard of Black Friday before then. I can tell you the media isn’t exaggerating. I watched a woman bite another woman’s hand so she would let go of her Furby. Then her son picked it up and ran. I left the store 2 weeks later.
Tamagotchi nightmares return again...!
Like 2017. Walmart in a Small town in remote new mexico
My coworker was the 3rd person in line to buy a super cheap tv. They only had 40tvs 1st person buys one. Second person buys 39 tvs. Apparently there wasnt a strict policy of so many to a customer.
She was the owner of a small local hotel and was buying them for her rooms.
People were furious. They had to get security to walk her to her car.
Couple days later he read someone broke into the hotel and stole 38 of the 39 tvs and left a note saying something like dont be so greedy
@@PandorasFolly🤣🤣🤣 wow
I was working Costco, the front door when Furbies were big.
And I can concur there were all out fist fights. Knock down people, grab & run was the norm.
One day it was an old woman who got knocked over...... absolutely unbelievable sh*t
@@Elhastezy888 I remember hearing about something like that Furby fight! It was insane! I also remember when the tickle me Elmo was going around too, people had absolute brawls over that stupid thing!
In high school, I remember going to the mall with a friend on Black Friday just to watch people frantically shopping. It was a spectator sport for us. This was in the late 1980s, before the rise of Big Box stores. The local news channels would always send reporters out to the local malls to get footage of people behaving badly: trampling each other as the stores opened, fighting one another for the last of a hot item. So the Black Friday phenomenon started a little earlier than mentioned here. It definitely escalated in the 1990s, but was definitely a thing in the 80s.
I like calling it a sport. Yeah going to the Mall on Friday morning after Thanksgiving to get the Christmas shopping done at least as much as possible then getting the heck out! I could get out by 11am. Prided myself on my speed at which i got through my list. Now it’s just muddled crap. Dragged out from the beginning of Nov till Christmas. Sad.
Yup, the Big Thing of the '80s was something my dad participated in. He went out on Black Friday 1983 to get me a Cabbage Patch Kid for Christmas. He is an imposing figure, so he had no trouble getting his hands on one. Later, he told how he watched people going at each other and even stopped another man from trying to grab a CPK from a petite woman.
I HATE Black Friday... As an online retailer, we don't offer any extra discounts or sales lower than we run throughout the year. Typically, in August, we start getting phone calls asking us what our Black Friday deals will be. By October and November our sales start really declining. Then Black Friday - Cyber Monday, we make pretty much all of our sales for the month in that one weekend, making it a horrible week of work for a months worth of orders to be processed. By the end of it all, we end up with an average month.
It declines because people are waiting for the BF?
@@EmyN pretty much, because why would you buy something now if it's possible to get it cheaper later
I remember when we started really calling it Black Friday in stores in the early 90s. It had nothing to do with stores going into the black, we called it that because it really really sucked to deal with the crowds on the first shopping day of the holiday season. I’m sure it’s one of those terms that was coined over and over in different places. But I feel like the whole “it’s about stores finally making a profit” is a retroactive attempt to make the term more acceptable to the suits and ignore the folks in the trenches.
They make record profits all year around that's the problem
Damn, I don't remember the phrase 'Black Friday' being used until 2003 or so. Before that, it was always 'Day after Thanksgiving sale'. It may be a regional thing, I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest
@@DonnaDoveWinters This wasn’t used in ads or anything, it’s just what we called it to each other on the sales floor here in Minnesota. I worked at Best Buy from 1992 through 1995 at a couple of different stores. Lemme tell you, though, that day was _nothing_ like the insanity we’d see in the 00s and 10s. Busy, frustrating, and awful to work yeah but I don’t recall having that many more people than usual waiting to get in when we opened (there was almost always a few folks waiting to get in on weekends).
@@silmarian Holy cow! I used to work retail, but not Best Buy, which is one of the worst places to be during black Friday. You earned your stripes!
I remember the term Black Friday coming on the scene in the 90s, too. I had to do with retailers making their biggest profit margins the day after Thanksgiving.
I worked in a Target distribution center for twenty years and was working 60 hours from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve. Thanksgiving and Black Friday were always rough. As I drove to work I would pass the stores with people lined up waiting for the stores to open. Now that I'm retired, I still won't go out on Black Friday.
I was a Friday night mall rat in the early 2000s. We loved Black Friday because the mall stayed open till midnight so we didn't have to leave. We weren't interested in buying anything, just hanging out and watching the chaos.
I used to love it as a kid too but now seeing Christmas decor at the beginning of October and emails as early as late October. I remember looking forward to the day after to check out the stores.
It’s just amazing how this really ramped up around the year COVID started. I think people also have anxiety with getting the “perfect gift” so they want to get it over with. I’m just annoyed and want to somehow burn my email app so I can stop getting these emails. Everyone is broke.
Ugh it's the worst. In Australia it's out of hand just as much. I've worked in retail during a Christmas period. What a fkn joke! People just rush in...they don't even know what they're there for.
I bitched from the moment in October i saw the first Christmas item for sale to anyone who had ears. Most agreed. It ruined the holiday. Finally in November i talked about the Easter displays coming out the following week. I guess this is the new normal…. We gotta just suck it up.
I just got myself a new drawing tablet to use for my iMac , Bluetooth haha I'm a artist .. however I dont want to feel guilted in buying someone a Christmas gift for Christmas .. shit gets expensive.
@@reneeelias9514I have yet to see Easter stuff before January -- or even February. But I'm sure it's on the way :(
The start of the decline for me was when retailers started creating special SKUs for black friday deal items. This had the dual effect of enabling them to sell cheap versions of nicer things that you might want to get on sale, and making it harder to look up items to research whether they were worth having, because no one had them to review prior to the sale.
I work in retail in the UK. There was a brief moment when Black Friday was a thing here where people went crazy for a TV or just bought into the whole "It's Black Friday so it must be a good deal" thing. I recall as the weeks passed and we got closer to Christmas there was confusion as to why things were quiet. It didn't take a genius to figure out we had just brought peoples purchases forward, they didn't just buy more stuff.
I still see BLack Friday being advertised but it's a half hearted effort and I don't think people really care.
I feel like most people have an overspending problem these days, myself included. And you're right, it's because advertisers use behavioral psychology to manipulate us more and more. They really rely on the sense of urgency and FOMO with these little countdown timers and labeling things as "low stock" when they might not be at all. It's all madness, and I'm really glad that Black Friday has chilled out. With it being extended to about 2 months of time with "deals" that feel more like a typical price, it does make it less enticing. It also doesn't ironically overshadow Thanksgiving anymore, or cause the same aggressive behavior. Black Friday at its peak was the most toxic display of excessive consumerism I've ever seen.
I also believe the pandemic made FOMO and the sense of urgency worse because we are still coming out of a trauma of not finding anything in the grocery stores and supermarkets and we feel the need to buy something we don't need or might already have in the house.
honestly this is why i don’t ever want to buy things. i only want things recommended to me by a person i know who has tried the product and still liked it AFTER the hype died down
I've noticed a trick one of the companies I generally like uses is in their "hot deals" page, which is just where they buy a stock of an item once and sell it until it sells out, when an item has been listed for a long time because they can't sell it they'll tag "BEST SELLER!" on it to try to tempt people who don't know how the deals page works into buying it 🤦♂️
It's the mentality of never being satisfied...putting into practice, the philosophy that "things always need to get bigger and better". The NFL is another good example of this.
I actually miss what a true “Black Friday” shopping day with good deals was like. It’s so watered down, and the discounts aren’t even good anymore! It’s not even worth going out ON Black Friday. Loved this video!!
if the discount isn’t a minimum of 40% off i ain’t going. They’re employee discounts now it’s embarrassing. tf am i gon do with 15% off?? 😂
None of the things I need, want, or plan on gifting to people go on sale for black Friday, so I just don't even bother anymore.
Over spending is a huge issue with people who have addiction or executive function disorders. Thank you for approaching them with compassion.
I sometimes have problems overspending.. but lately.. I’m so sick of seeing “Black Friday deals”, i go online and nothing looks like an actual deal anymore. Prices are still too high
Nice editing! The algorithm believes in you.
fax
Algorithm brought me here :)
Never participated in Black Friday sales after my introduction to it. Traffic was unbearable, parking was nonexistant, & the prices were artificially inflated the month prior & reduced back to their normal price to give the illusion of a sale. But the past year or two, it has become the best day to grocery shop with the best parking & the best traffic, because everyone stayed home.
I like your little purple blob animations... they are so cute especially the innocently swinging legs blob. Very well done edits and video essay. 👏👍👍👍
Very good thoughts and points. Black Friday is a shell of itself all because capitalism couldn’t be content with having a weekend for deals. They’re just extending BF to a whole month nowadays with a couple of awful deals on the actual BF day. Worked in electronics retail and they’ve been doing this for years now.
Also what’s the music? It’s so good
I think the retailers have shot themselves in the foot by extending black Friday. No it is special anymore and the prices aren't worth the effort.
That's exactly it. For me BF is jeans day. I feel like I have unintentionally been tracking BF because every year I buy at least one pair of jeans since my senior year of HS 2009. I can say the deals were steadily getting better until the late 2010s when I could easily find Levi's, CK or American Eagle jeans for more than 50% off, but the last 4-5 years those deals have slowly disappeared. I begrudgingly bought one pair of jeans last year for like 15% off , and this year for the first time i didn't even bother.
Great video! I always wondered why black friday never included groceries, things you NEED, not just random shit. Its highly disappointing. Grey season is the best term ive ever heard for black friday. It does feel pretty sad now. Hope your channel blows up, i was expecting this video to have thousands of views, i didnt realize till i reached the comments tht youre not nearly appreciated enough. Im sure you'll reach that appreciation quickly!
As someone who works in a grocery store, it’s already crazy the week of Thanksgiving with everyone buying for holiday meals. Then it will be the same for Christmas. We need a little break in between the two.
I suppose the reason is people would buy it anyway. Plus if they are routinely buying something and see the discount is higher than regular price it looks bad. The correct question should be why are the quality items never a deal. I can get better deals on Christmas stuff and other supplies right before Christmas.
Yeah, it’s annoying to me that the best deals are always on TVs. How many TVs do people need and buy?
yes! i always wonder this! are there millions of people buying new tvs every year across the country? its so odd.@@sierrarmcclain
@@sierrarmcclain That's a big part of why sales are on TVs. People don't buy them as much and they go out of date pretty quickly to be replaced with the new thing. So there are always a ton left unsold from the year that retailers want to get rid of.
It's like in Elmo Saves Christmas, when Elmo made it Christmas every day, people got tired of it because it wasn't special anymore. Black Friday deals all month, or even more often than that takes away the special nature it had. Not that there aren't any companies that still stick to the actual day.
My mom's lifelong hobby is bargain shopping; I spent countless hours with her thrifting, haunting discount outlets, factory sales, etc. For us, Black Friday was kind of the Shopper's Holiday. The stores were trying to give offloading excess inventory a Sense of Occasion, and we were happy to scoop up deals. Some time during the rise of fast fashion and disposable goods in the late 90s and early 00s, the goods got so much worse and cheaper in general, it just wasn't worth bothering. Everything is always available online, everything comes from the same pool of low cost manufacturers, no matter the brand name. If I want a doughnut maker I can wake up at 3am and demand one on my phone. Goods have no meaning, we are drowning in them. Black Friday is no longer my way to affordably score a really beautiful slightly out of season designer dress, or a quality piece of electronics; it's just more pop up ad noise.
TL:DR - I'm old and nothing is good anymore, and I miss shopping uphill both ways in the snow. Thank you.
I had a colleague whose mom used to work for purchasing for Macey’s and she said the better deals are in early October or mid December. They said that while stores may have a few actual “big deal” items she said they (retailers) actually ever so slightly start inching the price up starting in mid-October so when it gets to be Black Friday and they discount the product by 50% it is only 25% or less.
The sales genuinely have gotten worse. It's common practice now to inflate the price and then "discount" it back to what they normally mark it as. You save zero money.
yeah I get sooooo many notifications form amazon in the weeks after black friday that something i put in my "saved for later" dropped in price by 10% then another 5% then 1.5% until it steadies out at what it was sold for on black friday. It's pretty much been par for the course for quite a few years now at least
Finally someone said it. Since your channel is about criticizing marketing, could you talk about ad placement? Specifically wtf they were thinking when they came up with “our ad will interrupt their content/video/song. That will surely make them want to buy the thing.” As a consumer, that really induces a rage response and makes me 0% likely to buy their thing. Or why huge companies (coke, mcd, etc) still bother advertising at all. Like, nobody is on the fence about that product line or establishment; everyone has made up their mind on whether they’ve chosen to get addicted to those products or not. I’m just wondering why they even need to advertise anything at all. I don’t imagine they’re getting much new business from advertising, they’ve already got their current consumers locked down, and nobody doesn’t know and needs to be informed about the existence. So what are they doing? Why advertise at all when you’re that well-known? Or what about a video on the fake virtue-signaling companies do? Like is it just a front because it’s cancel-able if you don’t (pride month for example)? Does anyone take commercials or marketing seriously? How??
Great content.
Edit: spelling
The best I got is new customers or the younger generation. But completely agree when a commercial interrupts what I'm doing/ watching I won't buy it.
I think it has something to do with it being noticeable. You don't remember any of the ads bookending something, but if an ad's entire slot on its own is enough to piss you off, youre more likely to remember the ad
@@boojersey13 yeah but I’m never going to convert that memory into a sale. Completely pointless. Like, I’ve made up my mind about products and services, and I buy everything based on need rather than suggestibility. I just don’t see the point in commercials. They just ruin my content experience.
@jarfullofgravity I'm the type to research a product for days or weeks before purchase. Adds aren't for people like us. They're for people whose lives are chasing emotions.
Coke and other huge brands like that still advertise cuz its good for brand awareness. You'd be surprised how many people buy things just cuz of name recognition
I worked 4 Black Fridays at different stores in my local mall at the end of high school and into college. They were the worst days of the whole year at work. The absolute worst comes out of people for deals on the dumbest crap. And the mess that came from it lasted for days.
The production value for being such a small channel is awesome. I loved the video, keep it up, this is the kind of content I like to see!
I remember this weird thing where my first employer (1999-2003) had a standing policy that "you will not refer to it as Black Friday, and you can be fired for saying that". How weird it was to see it marketed so hard after that experience.
My favorite is when a retailer would have TVs specially made for black Friday with inferior materials and parts to look like an existing model so they can sell it as what would have been list price for the quality you get. If you look at the model number you'll see that it never existed before Black Friday.
Now some stores do this bs " Christmas in July" thing. I worked at a retail chain store that did this for 4 years and I always thought it was so stupid.
They've ruined Christmas too.
When they start playing Christmas commercials on Halloween night, that really pisses me off...has for decades.
15:14 One of the best life advice my parents gave me is to not have a credit card, only debit. It forces me to think about my necessities and how I actually spend my money. Because credit cards are basically a scam, if you don’t have the money now, you most likely won’t have it later so there is no point in risking a debt to anyone, especially a bank.
Lmao y’all really are dumb. The point of a credit card is to use it when you DO have the money for some thing and then you immediately pay off your balance when it comes due so you can build your credit for free with no risk. what people always mess up, Is they use it when they don’t have the money and then they don’t pay it off and they get raked over the coals but if you always pay the balance in full, you never face any extra costs and you build your credit for free. That is unless you get a credit card that has a bunch of bull crap fees but if you go to a credit union, you should be good.
Thank you for the empathy -- I have a real problem with overspending when I feel vulnerable, as a dopamine-seeking behaviour... videos like yours help remind me to think with my logical, psychologically literate mind, as opposed to my emotional urges.
i just think with my other emotional urge: spite
It’s not the interest of private companies, but of the investor class. The constant push to growth leaves most corporations in crumbles, but the investor class externalizes the losses of collapse but reap the profit that comes from the growth of new companies that come to replace the old.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but I think spreading out Black Friday over a week or even a month is a good idea. 1) It lightens the load on retail employees. 2) It’s safer for shoppers. 3) It allows supplies to cycle through with more ease, creating more sales (because employees can actually stock in time and make it presentable) thus boosting the economy. I don’t think this is sad at all. Black Friday is hell for a lot of people so the stretch is honestly a relief.
Not to mention it allows people with less income to actually participate. I cannot count the amount of times when I worked a shitty job going "Wow that sale is amazing! Too bad I won't have any disposable income for another five days!" and then it's gone in two days. Scooped up by all the middle classers who seem to always have money no matter how bad the economy gets.
This would be great if some retailers actually stocked their sale product all season long. The one I work for only sends my location 80% core products and 20% fashion. Only fashion goes on sale and we are always low in stock on those items. Our bigger stores had tons of sale products left for Black Friday whereas my shop only had two small sections (4-foot hang bars) of product left. I had 2 sale signs in the whole store. We did better with those singular big sales than we have in any of the last three "stretched" sale seasons. This was because even core products were discounted for a day or two.
There is no more middle class so I guess it might be easier for you now.@@PinkManGuy
Aa former retail employee it doesn’t lighten shit. The whole season lasting longer prolonged my suffering.
I had to put out Christmas shit in October and the store was staying open later for just as long. Instead of a sprint it’s a bunch of back to back marathons. First back to school then halloween then black friday then the endless hell of christmas. It sucks.
I still find it appalling that the blob saw the terrible behavior of the public on black friday, this example being breaking down doors and entering the shops, and decided to capitalize it and turn it into a new buzzword called "doorbusters"
Oooh i need more of this analysis of corporate marketing. The blob is a fascinating creature and I need more critiques of it.
The death of it for me was when I worked at a sporting goods store. The first year, we opened at 3AM, but the competition opened at 1AM.
The next year, we opened at midnight. The third year, we opened at 5PM on Thanksgiving day so that we’d be open before our competition.
Until that point, Black Friday had been, to me, the day my dad would get up early and go buy new work boots. Money was so tight for us that buying new boots during the normal year meant we had to do without something that month.
Being at work thanksgiving day to watch people get in fistfights over fishing gear, firearms, and go carts taught me that Black Friday didn’t mean the same thing to other people. I looked forward to it because it meant we could finally get some things we needed.
This doesn't even address that electronics manufacturers are manufacturing lower quality products to sell exclusively during black Friday sales. With the discounts being so deep, retailers don't want their loss leaders to lose them too much money, and so the manufacturers are using lower quality panels (for TV's) and internal electronics to make these wildly underpriced devices sellable at such a low price without the retailer losing money on the deal.
Good job. I think if you did more videos about the despicable history of consumerism in America, the algorithm would (ironically) reward you
Great video! I've never liked black friday, it just never feels worth it, but I've had the same feeling of dissapointment in other holidays that have lost their meaning over time for me
I have a happy relationship with Black Friday. My locally owned upscale pet supply store does have some great deals on preserved chews and frozen raw food and treats, which is the extent of my shopping. It's busier than normal, but folks who shop there are all pretty civilized and well-mannered.
The rest of the day, my day job is at a large regional animal shelter, and we have free or discounted adoptions on all primarily black animals, and it's usually very successful! 😊
My fiancée and her mother hit the box stores, and I do NOT envy them.
I feel like the deals are nowhere near as good! I used to have a fun time participating in Black Friday in high school with my siblings, mostly because it's fun to go to the mall and get starbucks at 5am, it feels surreal! But it was also a great time to restock on makeup as everything I needed to restock on for the year would be discounted. Now, there are no 'straight' discounts, and instead you need to buy a bundle or a box set to get any kind of "deal". It's just greedy and wasteful and not worth it at all anymore.
i was pretty surprised when i checked the views on this vid. super underrated n glad someone said something about it. keep it up man!
I'm in Australia where we don't even have Thanksgiving & it was really Amazon finally coming here in 2017 that pushed Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. Other retailers had to compete & now it's a grown into a 2 week retail event.
Most people here wouldn't even know it's associated with Thanksgiving. Just a sale!
Marketing at its finest..
Black Friday in Australia also means a totally different thing: 13th January 1939 was one of Australia's worst bushfires which killed 71 people, it was called Black Friday. So Black Friday sales are seen by many as both tasteless and pointless, which might explain why retailers keep trying, but they aren't making any more money or extra sales on Black Friday in Australia than they do on any other normal day of the year.
@@grandmothergoose Great point! I'd forgotten about that I'm ashamed to say. All I used to think when I heard Black Friday. We used to have remembrance at school for Black Fri, Ash Wednesday. Now when I hear black friday I just think of the sales. Wow 🤔
first video ive seen of yours. i like the chill, informative atmosphere of your vids!
Thank you for making an "End of Black Friday" video that actually explains it really well.
“The ones that burn brightest, but burn out very quickly”
That will end up being an apt description of our species, I’m afraid
With every company trying to "outdo" the others, it has become a giant mess. I used to like Black Friday but it is not even worth it since it practically runs all month long. Once I went to Black Friday at one store and then decided to go to another store for their deals only to realize this other store started their "Black Friday" a few days early and all the "good deals" were sold out. It is just not fun anymore.
I just came across this video naturally and I’m so glad I did! I love your style, the delivery, the natural-ness, the critique, this character of “the blob”. Your content is exactly what I’ve been looking for for years now! Keep it up!
Went to Circuit City Black Friday sale In 2007. Got there around 5am and didn’t get in the door until around 11am, 6 hours later. Then it took so long to get any help and check out, I didn’t get out of there until 2pm. The hunger and sleep deprivation helped me make irrational decisions and spend way too much. Bought a bunch of stuff with mail in rebates and some of them didn’t work. Got a free printer I didn’t need but there are so manny given away it was worthless on EBay and it sold for cost of shipping only. In the end, it was one of the most regrettable events of my life.
Thank you for making this video touching on many different aspects of consumerism.Americans are hit with a never ending barrage of ads and commercials aimed at making us feel we absolutely have to get their products or we are incomplete. That combined with a 'keeping up with the Joneses'''mentality has resulted with so many people being woefully in debt, using credit cards that will keep them poor to feed their needs for useless stuff. Great video
Love your writing skills and the dry humor, keep at it!
subscribed! ☺️ i like The Blob analogy, it’s very fitting
You’re about to take off. I never get recommended channels with this many subscribers.
I worked retail in ~2013 and I feel like it also started to go downhill when the stores started opening earlier and earlier. Ours started opening on Thanksgiving evening, and it seemed like a LOT less people came bc they were spending time with family. There was also less foot traffic later in the night and I think it was because people assumed the really good deals would be gone if they didn't show up when the doors opened.
Either way, it made me miss Thanksgiving with my family that year.
this is so true! im extremely distracted by the background music though, its hard to focus on your words😭
Subscribed. I just did a bunch of online shopping and for the items I wanted very few of them were even on sale. I think I should have just bought the items when I wanted to get them originally.
I loved this analysis and I am shocked that it has less than 800 views?! Great content and I can’t wait to see you get big on here
I was so surprised to see this video didn't have thousands of views. It was a great video!
welp. You're gonna blow up. crazy I was here since the 100's!!!
Retail definitely ruined the holidays for me. What was once a time that I was excited for food and presents, it just now became a sense of dread
Retail made me hate humanity and corporations as well. Glad I’m out of it now.
Really thoughtful take and excellent editing. I had no clue you weren't a 30k channel yet.
While Black Friday has been wheezing for the past few years, inflation has been its ultimate suffocation.
As a pastime I enjoy deal-hunting year around, and everywhere from Harbor Freight to Best Buy, seeing an actual bargain is a real rarity these days. Even when inflation adjusted (20% since 2019), discounted prices often remain higher than retail prices. I'm pretty confident this BF will be a non-event.
However as the effects of high interest rates ripple through the economy, I expect to see the tide turn back around in the coming year as consumers demand more bang for their buck again.
(13:10) At least for PC parts, pcpartpicker has a price history graph for a number of retailers. It's a shame Amazon isn't one of those listed, but you can compare against competitors and competitor histories that way.
I noticed this year (2023) "Black Friday" started on November 1st
Great video. Thank you for mentioning about some "regular" prices being marked up and the "sales" price is actually the regular price. I've seen it myself in a big box store. How I caught it was I had known the usual price for some of the things in the store and noticed the price on a "sale" day. It totally discussed me. I've never been a shopper on black Friday or any other day like it (here in Canada we have a boxing day sale as well) as I'm usually stretched for cash (which in my opinion is a safe thing during these "sale" times and it helps me to prioritize where I put my money.)
0:28 I clicked subscribe just cuz the dry humor bro I’m here for it
From the standpoint of a former retail manager, I was always told "Black Friday" was significant because that was the last date that we could order a restock of products in time for Christmas. At a toy store, that was a big deal and our sales focused on making room for that last minute inventory.
In an era of last minute shipping, that might have changed.
Funny as hell to get a black Friday ad IMMEDIATELY after this video 😂☠️
Once again I'm reminded to be thankful that I come from a healthy family where even though my dad and I have opposite political beliefs we still like each other and all of my siblings.
I think one of the most obvious trends is the Stanley cup. Functionally no different than the cups we all already have. And yet all of those influencers have one of those monstrous cups they hold in every video
The term Black Friday came from bringing retailers' bottom line into the black (profitable) from the red (loss).
I run a store in Second Life (yes, it still exists, and has lots of people still on in it) and "Black Friday" this year has started like a week early. I saw tons of stores start their Black Friday sales a whole week early. What the hell?
It's because people have very, very, VERY little money to spend on anything other than what's necessary. They are going to be watching like hawks for the 1 or 2 things they have to have and ready to grab it and they are done. Stores are gambling on what essential items must be replaced and selling them for BF deals earlier than the next competitor.
My Dad had me watch 'Brazil' with him when I was a teenager... Needless to say I never developed much of an interest in Black Friday.
Fun intro to the channel! I remember in middle/high school when stores started opening on Thursday and everyone started taking a step back on their own, in their own time. I almost wish I had been a bit older to enjoy the hype and yet I know it’s better I didn’t because no one’s really NEEDS a misdemeanor charge for assaulting someone over a sale 😅😅
Amazing production value on the video: great job. One point: we had "Black Friday" concept in Poland where I live but we very quickly arrived to the point you are now couple of years ago. Since in Poland we don't celebrate Thanksgiving there was no real reason for having the deals on The Actual Friday. So it stuck to Friday for like 2 years and it quickly evolved into night shopping events, then "Black Week" and since like 3-4 years it's actually called Black Month with different deals on each day. This year they actually had Grey Month event in April with the same ad layouts from last year's Black Friday reused. It's riddiculous :D
Best advice I ever got: Do you want/need it enough to be willing to pay full price? If not save your money!
1: Screw being shoved around in Best Buy by unbathed philistines for 45 minutes to save $20 on a PlayStation.
2: Screw the prices being out of this world inflated the other 364 days.
3: Screw brick and mortar stores for blaming shoppers for their high rent. They signed the lease.
We need insulin and shelter more than our billionaires need more of our money.
Geat video, just wanted to communicate My appreciation for the background music. *chef's kiss* it's a bop 🎷
You deserve more subs! I'm proud to be subscriber #69 :3
Black Friday wasn't a thing at all here in the UK until a few years ago when it came sailing over from the US on the good ship Amazon. Now it's everywhere, but people here don't really seem to care that much, unless they were looking to buy something specific and wait to see if it goes on sale. Perhaps it is because we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so it is just a random Friday near Christmas for us. Or maybe the blob already sucked it dry before it got here.
Keep up the great content!
This comment was 17 hours ago and they’re already at 705 with my sub.
@@JaneCarolineIsFine so happy for them!
Maybe you Brits have a "Thank goodness we finally got rid of those silly Pilgrims" holiday?
@@DrunkenUFOPilot I'll take it - any excuse for a nice big feast! 😂
NO WAY, that's a big flex to be the sixty ninth subscriber to Not Buying It
congrats @@pochikart2567 !
- mico
was shocked when i see i’m the 337th sub. you deserve success this is awesome
As someone who has worked in retail for not even that long (just over a year now), knowing other people who have worked for longer have described it as being a hellish weekend to a hellish month instead and I can relate, I work with a 4 man skeleton crew for online orders at slowes and it is honestly the worst work I see myself doing, pulling 10-12 hour days 5-6 days a week and calling a 15k step day light work has got me so worn down I can't even muster up the energy to do any paperwork for going to school, I just crash and burn at this point.
Just what I needed to start off the holiday season!
This is awesome! The algorithm def picked It up!🔥
what charming little acquaintances you have there
Subbed, proudly. You did great with this. Keep em coming
I was a retail clerk at the old Montgomery Wards the year Furby came out. The moment shoppers ascended the escalator to the floor I was on and running to my department to grab one is etched in my memory. Just surreal.
Excellent video. I worked in retail for almost a decade and have observed this firsthand. Articulate and thoughtful, subbed.
I originally thought Black Friday was a holiday like MLK day when I was younger.
It seems to me that the best sales are now the week before black friday and black friday "deals" are getting worse and worse each year.
Congrats on your first big video, we're looking forward to more from you in the future!