Black friday is a thing in Italy??
Started as a shy e-commerce thing here. Then became a huge e-commerce thing. Then a huge all commerce thing. I am seeing "Black Friday" promotions everywhere, from financial services to beauty treatments.
A common joke here is that it is "Black Fraud - pay 50% of the double of the price"[0] Because a lot of shops just smoothly increase their prices in the previous weeks, so when the date arrives, they can advertise "50% off discounts". To the point that there are websites monitoring this kind of fraud and official agencies inspecting and fining companies.
[0] The pun "Black Friday" works in Portuguese too, as shops use the original term in English and fraud is "fraude" in Portuguese.
It might depend on the industry though.
My impression (about the retail version, say 15-20 years ago) was that it was companies offloading stock they wanted off their books at something of a discount ahead of the holiday season, since it let the companies close out their books for the year and customers get a little bit more for the holidays. It was a win-win in a lot of ways.
Then the disgusting marketing/accounting shenanigans took hold and made it shitty, particularly the online version. It's still possible to find genuine deals, mostly because retailers do still have stock they want to offload.
American cultural imperialism is really impressive. I can understand why Halloween gets more and more popular over here since it's a fun holiday for kids but I can't figure out how black friday makes any sense when you don't celebrate Thanksgiving. I also don't understand why they hope to make "black friday" a positive brand when the only thing I associate it with is videos of Americans trampling each other to get cheap appliances.
Also, discount days are regulated in France (called "les soldes"); normally you can't have a discount day any time you want, you have to apply for authorization.
I sell on Amazon in Europe for the first time this year (started in January); I don't do discounts but am anxious to see if sales will rise this week-end.
What is the rationale for that?
Similarly, for many years the very large retailers couldn't open on Sunday afternoons, although that restriction mostly benefited the large chains of medium-sized shops, since it was based on the size of the shop rather than the company.
Few people realise it's related to American thanksgiving.
To be fair, it's not only marketing. Ideas move by themselves.
Why does this surprise you? The amount of celebrations (reasons to have sales) have increased throughout the years. If you got sales regularly people will wait till stuff's on sale. Now they gotta wait less long. It might seem silly, but the whole trick is to get people to buy things they'd otherwise not buy.
During the next few years, other sellers joined the trend pushing it even more.
This year, in order to stay competitive, Amazon Spain has been "forced" to follow the trend and have a Black Friday WEEK.
But given that we somehow started to carve pumpkins etc in recent years, I don’t doubt that we’ll have turkey and annoying uncles at thanksgiving within just a few years.
Right now Thanksgiving is only a Black Friday sale and nothing else.
How so? There's nothing explicitly religious about the holiday.
Just this morning I was reading this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/opinion/thanksgiving-reli...