Black Friday in the UK #BriFri
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Last week, I reflected on my week in Birmingham in the UK Midlands — with photos! Tina reviewed the London Cookbook about the modern culinary scene in London. Sim took the occasion of Leonard Cohen’s death to stop by the Marble Arch in her virtual tour of London. Becky reviewed Five Children on the Western Front.
Happy Black Friday! Black Friday, of course, is the day after Thanksgiving in the US, our traditional start of the Christmas shopping season. Office workers generally get both Thursday and Friday off this week, so it’s an opportunity for people to get out during the four-day weekend.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Wikipedia reports the first usage of Black Friday in 1961 in Philadelphia where it was more about the traffic than the shopping. I grew up in a small town in the 60s and 70s so I was completely unaware of it until sometime in the 1980s when I’d moved to the St. Louis area.
The popular explanation for the name Black Friday is that it’s the day in the year that retailers go from being in the red for the year to being in the black. That thought was so terrifying to me that I never seriously considered opening a retail business. Can you imagine operating for 11 months of the year without a profit and only what you make in that last month is what makes you successful? Too much stress for me.
Some shops in the UK have tried to import the US enthusiasm for Black Friday, to limited success. I love the first line of this article:
Love it, hate it or mock it mercilessly: Black Friday is back with a vengeance this week.
As in the US, sales on technology items are at the forefront of Black Friday. The Mirror has a helpful article detailing the best bargains in the UK. The Telegraph‘s article includes a countdown clock to Black Friday since our UK friends won’t have the reminder of Thanksgiving parades, football games, and meals.
While researching the phenomenon of Black Friday in the UK, I learned about a whole different use of the term. The most popular night for office Christmas parties in Britain is the Friday night before Christmas. This results in an increased need for police and ambulance services, so emergency personnel called that night Black Friday. More recently, the British have taken to calling it Mad Friday to distinguish the partying event from the shopping event earlier in the season.
Are you doing anything special for Black Friday? I’m staying home! But we don’t do much in the way of Christmas shopping these days.
I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving Joy! I’m writing this, as I usually do, from bed. I can’t imagine stirring from my morning routine to face the crowds and lines for some supposed amazing deal. It just has never been my idea of fun.
Cheers!
I’m afraid Black Friday doesn’t mean much in our household. If we needed something, we’d obviously take notice of it – but we don’t at the moment and haven’t begun to seriously think about Christmas. I hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving. To coincide with this, I have written a couple of pieces about George Washington – especially for the many thousands that regularly read A Bit About Britain across the Pond :-).
We never do anything for Black Friday, but this morning we were staying with BIL and SIL, so SIL and I went out to do a little needed shopping that had nothing to do with the day. I did get 30% off a book though, at a specialty bookshop, so that was nice.
Of course my company does Black Friday by putting all our black sleepwear on sale.
There is a store that offers half off all socks for Black Friday and I do go and stock up. The only brands they don’t carry that I like are Hue for their tights and Smart Wool, but every other brand is there. It is a fun atmosphere too with the store opening at 5 AM and the sale stops at 1. They put out cider and coffee and donuts. It is easy to pick up some extra socks for the homeless at the same time.
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