This weekend saw violent scenes across Britain. There were human pile-ups, punch-ups and several people clinging on for dear life. Or clinging to television sets, that is. These bust-ups took place in the aisles of Tesco and Asda where grown adults fought tooth and nail for cut-price electrical goods, and up and down the UK’s busier-than-usual high streets where people trampled each other in search of a bargain jumper or drss. For it was Black Friday, the latest landmark of extreme consumerism that has come to mark the start of the festive season, and to say that shoppers went for it, both IRL and online, is an understatement.
Falling on the public holiday following Thanksgiving, Black Friday has traditionally been a huge shopping day in the US, when shops use huge discounts to take advantage of carb-drunk Americans with nothing better to do than start stockpiling Christmas presents, while Cyber Monday, its online evil twin, was born later when digital retailers wanted a piece of the spending pie too. While for a long time us Brits remained content to up our Christmas shopping game with late-night Thursdays at House of Fraser, only mildly aware of the frenzy taking place across the pond, the internet has changed everything.
At a time when the ‘premiering’ of an advert the second the first autumn leaves begin to fall has become as big a Christmas event as opening the first door on your advent calendar, it seems inevitable that the cash-sucking highlights of the American holiday season would come to define ours too, and so this weekend, more UK retailers than ever jumped on the Black Friday and Cyber Monday bandwagon.
As well as year-round offer-happy websites such as Amazon and ASOS bringing their cut-price A game this weekend, higher-end brands such as Harvey Nichols, Whistles, Selfridges and even niche fashion brands such as Baukjen offered sizable discounts to anyone who joined the clicking spree between Friday and Monday. Topshop, whose site proudly trumpeted, ‘we're doing Black Friday in a big way!’, offered up to 50% of a cross-section of its stock, and River Island’s site temporarily crashed during a flash-sale over the course of a few hours on Friday afternoon.
Read More: The Black Friday Shopping List
But are people actually bagging low-priced ankle boots and sparkly jumpsuits with the idea of giving them as gifts anyway? Or has a spirit of OMG MUST BUY SOMETHING, just become part and parcel of the hugely extended Christmas period? It seems instead as though people are simply shopping for the shit of it, a sense of FOMO creeping in, as retailers force shopping messages into eyes that are catatonically scanning social media feeds – certainly if all the prolific shoppers boating about ‘Black Friday Hauls’ on Twitter is anything to go by.
‘Here is my long awaited Black Friday TRY-ON Haul 2014!’, YouTuber Tealaxx2enthused to her half a million subscribers on Sunday , before more than 600 of her followers retweeted the sentiment on Twitter. Not to mention the people who took the IRL option and physically fought for flat screen TVs, more likely in the heat of the frenzied moment, than because of some desperate, risk-worthy need to buy a friend a telly for Christmas.
On Friday alone Amazon UK recorded its biggest shopping day ever, with more than 5.5 million orders placed at a rate of 64 per second, and a further £650million in sales expected on Cyper Monday, according to The Independent, and something tells us Santa probably isn’t going to be half a billion pounds worth of generous this year. New beauty site Glossier may have prefaced their offer of free shipping in the US with an the altruistic urge to ‘treat unto others as you would treat yo self’ (if indeed sharing face mist can count as altruism), but with most retailers dangling a percentage off carrot in front of their not especially gift-focused stock, most seem to be more on the page of Harvey Nichols, whose discounting encourages its customer to ‘self-indulge’, alongside its suggestion of sharing.
But do you know what? It’s not too late for the Christmas period to be about more than buying at the rate you might if every shop ever was going to close tomorrow - it’s only 1st December FFS!
We’d bet you whatever it was you apparently saved that the gold vest-top you impulse bought on Friday won’t seem nearly as amazing when it actually comes in the post, and if it doesn’t, send it back, give the money that it didn’t seem like a big deal to spend at the time to charity. And don’t boast about it on social media. The buffet-sized bag of sausage rolls you bought is just frozen meat at the end of the day, even if the supermarket you obtained it from sucked you in with sentimental tears. You’ve still got a whole month to invite your mates round for festive drinks, and to spend a couple of extra days helping your parents sort the house out for family visits, or to write Christmas cards to the friends and relatives you’ve been meaning to make more of an effort with. And well, you definitely don’t need a big fat discount to do any of that.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.