Black Friday

I don't know how many people still go to outlets/groceries on Black Friday given the rapid development of online shopping and regular promotions across the year. After reading all the terrifying stories about queuing, trampling and parking wars on Thursday night, fatigue driving and traffic congestion on Friday, I decide to avoid the war and go on Saturday, which also turned out to be a terrible idea. The newly opened outlet in Livermore was packed with happy shoppers, and it took at least 15 min for us to find a parking space, and another 15 min to get a fitting room in Banana Republic. Impressed with the long line outside ladies' room and the crowd in the food court, we went home with a few new clothes, whose prices were found to be lower through online shopping later.

That's when I started to doubt how important the Black Friday is in nowadays when retailers have thousands of ways to promote sales. I can see in old days, when people learned about sales from local ads and had to prepare Christmas gifts, Black Friday became a good shopping opportunity for the family. But now, as the population booms, the non-monetary cost of shopping on Black Friday has increased, while other choices, i.e. online stores, with good discount and no crowd seem to be a better choice; and following promotions, such as Cyber Monday, also attract a few customers.

But people still flock into stores on the very day, blocking the highways exits and swarming malls. Habit is a second nature. Black Friday, created by shrewd businessmen, has become a tradition over years and taken as an important family activity. Probably people do not come only for shopping, but to enjoy some family time together. Once shopping becomes a tradition, other than a pure economic behavior, it's difficult to abstain from doing it, especially when surrounded by family members and friends. When I think about why we decided to go shopping during the holiday, it was partly because we wanted to show how Thanksgiving looks like in the US to some visiting students from China; and partly because we wanted to enjoy sometime with each other without harassment from work and computers.

Chinese businessmen learned from their American counterparts and turned Nov 11 into Chinese Black Friday. Nov 11 was named as "Single's Day" by college students since a few years ago as "1" is the loneliest number in the world. In the latest Single's Day, Chinese biggest online shopping website, Taobao started a one-day sale, which created a historical sales record of CNY19.1 billion. It looks like Chinese business people learned from the lessons in the US Black Fridays, and carefully avoided stampedes given Chinese big population by offering online sales instead of in-store ones. Nevertheless, the panic online purchase still slowed down internet and created some chaos, though luckily no one was physically hurt. In light of the big success of Single's Day Sale, it may evolve into a new shopping tradition, just as Christmas and Valentine's Day Sale in China.

I used to shop a lot in college, but become much less motivated in recent years. Maybe in the future, when my kids and parents want to experience some craziness in the US, I will still bring them to a mall, and celebrate a Black Friday together.