Black Friday

It started with Black Friday. Then someone in marketing had a bright idea, or possibly a stroke, and now we have Black Week, Black Weekend, Cyber Monday, and, inevitably, Black November. The only surprise is that we have not yet reached “Black Fiscal Year” with a loyalty card and a counselling hotline.

In America, Black Friday at least has the fig leaf of being after Thanksgiving. A day when people supposedly give thanks for what they have, then batter each other into the frozen food aisle to acquire what they do not. Hypocrisy, yes, but at least coherently themed hypocrisy.

Here, we do not even have that. We have simply taken a random American shopping spree, stapled it onto our calendar, and let it metastasise. Black Friday means nothing in Britain except “the day in late November when the inbox dies”. Yet bit by bit, it has spread from a single day to a long weekend, then a week, and now a month. You half expect the email to read: “BLACK NOVEMBER! One last chance, every day, for 30 days, until we do it again in December.”

There is an unmistakable stench of desperation about it all. You can feel the boardroom conversations. “Sales are flat. We need something bold.” “What if we make all of November a sale?” “Brilliant. Bonuses all round.” No one stops to ask whether people actually need any of this stuff, or whether they are just being emotionally blackmailed into hitting “Add to basket” because the button is flashing red.

The language is always the same. “Unmissable.” “Once in a lifetime.” “Final reductions.” You see it every single year, from the same retailers, on the same products, often at the same price as last week. There are factory recalls with more genuine urgency. But people still pile in, because the entire thing is designed to create that thin film of panic over the brain: if I do not buy this air fryer today, at this exact discount, my life will somehow be diminished.

You can almost see Reform UK getting in on the act. Give it five minutes and there will be some solemn press conference about “banning divisive woke terminology” in retail. Black Friday, Black Week, Black November, all to be scrapped and replaced in the next manifesto with “White Wednesday” or “Proper British Savings Month”, wrapped in a Union Flag and sold as a vital stand against cultural Marxism and half price toasters. They will not touch the consumerism, of course, just the colour palette.

Then there is the environmental angle. Endless lorries, vans, and planes moving a mountain of tat that will be landfill in 18 months. Extra packaging. Extra plastic. Extra journeys. All so someone can feel briefly triumphant that they saved 12 per cent on a TV that was already cheap because the manufacturer has quietly removed half the features.

Meanwhile, warehouse staff and drivers are the invisible collateral. Long hours, tight targets, miserable conditions. The adverts never show that, of course. Black November is always sold as a cosy family event, with a soft focus couple in loungewear clicking “Checkout” while sipping hot chocolate in a house lit like a John Lewis commercial. No one shows the picker sprinting down an aisle at 3 a.m. scanning barcodes so Gary in Swindon can get his Bluetooth egg boiler by Monday.

What amuses me most, in a bleak sort of way, is the sheer inflation of the hype. We have normalised the idea that a product’s value is not its build quality, longevity, or usefulness, but the size of the red cross painted over the “previous price”. That figure may have existed for roughly 14 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon in October, but never mind. “Was £299, now £249” is all people see. Whether they needed it in the first place is a secondary question, usually postponed until the credit card bill arrives.

Black November, in that sense, is a perfect symbol of our times. A permanent, rolling “limited time offer”. A month long emergency that repeats every year with clockwork predictability. The consumer equivalent of those politicians who declare every election “the most important of our lifetime”, including the last five.

Personally, I think the safest approach is to treat any email shouting “BLACK” at you that is not from your energy supplier as a sort of public health warning. If a retailer needs four weeks of neon graphics, countdown timers, and fake urgency to shift their stock, perhaps the stock is not the thing you are actually buying. What you are really purchasing is the tiny dopamine hit of “winning” in a game that has been rigged from the start.

Still, look on the bright side. At least when Black November finally gives way to “Christmas Event” and then “Boxing Day Sale” and then “New Year Mega Deals”, we can enjoy the warm glow of knowing that we have saved hundreds of pounds by spending thousands we did not have on things we did not need.

Bargain.