Copy-catting America’s biggest “shopping” tradition tad bit too much?
I cannot even begin to tell you how perplexed I am with the way Black Friday Sales have swept Indian consumers off their feet. With every online e-commerce platform and even offline stores — including the Spencer’s Daily next to my house — advertising the drop in prices across categories, it’s been quite a busy week for shoppers and this strategy seems to have worked for a lot of brands.
With footfalls in stores having decreased by 50–60% according to news reports this Diwali, Black Friday seems to have come to the rescue for a lot of offline stores. An ET story published on 30th November points out that some brands have seen a 15–20% increase in sales around Delhi-NCR; but at what cost? Consumerism.
While on one hand, we have the economy in a downward spiral, on the other, people can’t seem to get enough. With disposable incomes going through the roof, consumers want to buy more — millennials and Gen Zs alike. While discounts have been the buzzword for people to start hoarding and sales were largely seasonal, newer pricing and marketing strategies seem to have caught on quickly with newer out-of-context driven sales such as Black Friday Sales and apparently very soon, Super Bowl sales.
This brings me to my next point — do people ever wonder what Black Friday even stands for? So did I. And here’s what I found:
Black Friday was initially associated with financial crisis. Two Wall Street financiers bought a lot of gold thinking that they would sell it at a good price as the markets go up. On 24th September 1869 which happened to be a Friday, the US gold market crashed leaving both of them bankrupt. Here’s the story for you to read in detail in case you’re interested which also has another version. Oh, the irony!
But I guess it doesn’t matter what the day stands for when you can shop till you drop?
Here’s some food for thought: bigger brands with deep pockets can afford to repeat the Black Friday madness right before Christmas, after New Year’s or every other month. What about smaller businesses who also fall prey to this strategy of acquiring customers? This very snowball effect unfortunately proves Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. Consumers want more and you give them more, no matter what. Deeper the pockets, the better.
Makes us wonder how and when brands can use restraint instead of aping American shopping traditions that don’t even mean anything in the Indian context.
I can’t wait to see how Super Bowl is going to turn out to be!
