How to survive Black Friday and keep your sanity
Once again, the blackest Friday of the year, an annual celebration of consumer excess, is upon us
Black Friday, that annual spectacle of frenzied spending, has become a staple of modern life. Imported from the United States, like so many other things, it has firmly embedded itself in the cultural calendar of Spain and the world, sitting comfortably between those other two bastions of commercialism, Halloween and Christmas.
As a grand day of discounts, Black Friday invites shoppers to indulge in the ultimate modern ritual on the last Friday of each November: spending money, often on things they don’t need, in the name of a ‘bargain’.
Increasingly, it is being expanded to a whole week or more, so that what was once just an extra pre-Christmas shopping sales day has now become ‘Black Week’.
Shopping centres, high streets and online platforms teem with eager consumers, clutching credit cards as if they were shields against the existential dread of missing out. But how does this day of mass consumption repeatedly draw in millions of people?
The answer lies in the meticulous, almost predatory, marketing strategies of companies combined with the psychological quirks of the human brain.
Businesses prepare their Black Friday campaigns months in advance, crafting adverts and offers designed to exploit our cognitive biases. For instance, scarcity bias convinces us that limited-time offers are more valuable than they are, while loss aversion ensures we focus more on what we might miss out on than what we stand to gain.
Meanwhile, the ‘anchoring bias’, that sneaky tactic of showing the original price slashed dramatically, makes discounts appear irresistible, regardless of whether they represent real value. It is not unknown for shops, online retailers and even airlines to increase prices in the weeks leading up to Black Friday only to be able to show they have reduced them on the last Friday in November.
Of course, advertising saturates every medium, from emails and social media to television and billboards. Familiar phrases like “limited offer” and “while stocks last” fuel a sense of urgency, while the bandwagon effect ensures that no one wants to be the odd one out, sitting at home while friends and neighbours triumphantly declare their spending conquests.
Even online shopping, with its promise of ease and convenience, adds to the frenzy by eliminating queues and physical effort, leaving shoppers free to make impulsive purchases with a simple click.
Despite all the hype, the deals often fail to live up to the fevered anticipation. Discounts are frequently modest, or cleverly engineered to appear more impressive than they are. Retailers always remain the true winners, raking in profits while consumers bask in the fleeting dopamine rush of a ‘great deal’.
For those hoping to navigate Black Friday this year without emptying their wallets, experts suggest caution. To counteract the sneaky tactics used by retailers and marketers, be sure to define your needs beforehand, compare prices and resist the allure of artificial urgency.
And if nothing else, remember that this is not the last chance to shop! We have the January sales, Cyber Monday, Singles’ Day and countless other events waiting just around the corner for shopaholics to get their fix.
Black Friday may be marketed as a day of opportunity, but in reality, it often serves as a stark reminder of how easily we can be manipulated by savvy marketing and our own psychological tendencies.
Whether you join the chaos or abstain, the true winners of this consumerist holiday are rarely the shoppers.
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