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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Here in Norway we didn't have Black Friday until like a decade ago or so, when shops started introducing it. They even had to explain what it was all about in the ads.

Now it's no longer Black Friday, no... now we have Black Week and even Black November, filled with 10% off prices or deep discounts on old junk nobody wanted...

There's still a few really good deals, and there's a positive to concentrating the deals to one day: you're looking for deals. Doesn't help me that a thing was off even more a few months ago if I missed it then.

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Here in Brazil this year I saw a bunch of Black November. Yes, in english, in a country where people normally don't know english.

Even weirder, is today a cosmetics company said that "Black Friday" (in english like that!) is a racist name and they are comitted to changing it.

Most people here don't even know what "Black" means. (or "Friday", for that matter).

The amount of USA culture "invading" our culture is really disturbing me. (alongside some other stuff like Coca-Cola in fur coat red santa, in the middle of our super hot summers, or people trying to plant conifer trees in sunny wetlands and then covering them with artificial snow, or the dish "Rosquinha", that got renamed "Donut" after Dunkin Donuts came here).

EDIT: remembered that some years ago the government made illegal for stores to write only in english on their storefronts, after there was a huge mania for writing "xxx% off on randomproduct" and this was causing confusion among consumers that had no idea what that means.

It’s alright. After Black Friday loses influence you can do singles day and buy stuff from Alibaba instead shrug

I've seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi here in Germany.

Don't know what to make of it. Wouldn't want to have colored powders having thrown at me.

> Wouldn't want to have colored powders having thrown at me.

How about drinking cannabis infused milkshakes instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhang

Similar stuff happened in Slovenia since the 90’s.

When I was in elementary school we started celebrating Christmas and imported Santa, thus creating three, 3!, winter men who bring gifts (the catholic Saint Nick, the american Santa, the communist Grandpa Frost).

Then some time in high school Halloween became a thing. Even overtaking Nov 1st as the day of the dead because it’s a party and day of the dead is sad, lame, and for old people.

Towards the end of college, black friday started to become a thing.

Sometimes I wonder if college kids aregoing to start having July 4th parties …

It's no longer USA culture. Used to be a few decades ago when Nike and Coke was exported.

Today, it is a giant global corporate-driven monoculture. US has influx of many other cultures too (Sushi restaurants were hardly a thing in the 90's and Yoga).

To be honest, the world has gotten worse with globalisation and I don't mean that in the slightest political sense. Purely from cutural standpoint, the internet has sort of ruined isolated pockets of culture that thrive independently. In 2050, it will just be a giant same-everywhere Earth culture that will suck, even more so than today.

That's globalism for you. Multinational big corps pushing their shit globally, all the times ;->

Saúde!

Same in Canada, the funny part is that we do have thanksgiving but it's actually a month earlier so Black Friday is just sitting in November for no reason other than to nudge people into doing their Christmas shopping.

The reason why it has spread is American retailers, particularly Amazon, entering international markets.

In the US, Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year so American retailers discounted on that day. As they went into other countries, they began offering sales on that day too. In the UK, Boxing Day was traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year but most shops close on this day now. Wikipedia tells me that Boxing Day used to be the busiest shopping day in Canada.

I think the reason the practice is spreading into the rest of the month is because of the higher level of competition online. One retailer does Black Friday, then another retailer tries to jump earlier, then another. In the UK, we have had companies trying weekly and monthly sales.

The sales aren't bad, I think some retailers (Amazon, particularly) don't offer great value...ironic given they started Black Friday here in the UK...but if you hunt about, you can usually find some decent deals.

Yeah 10 years ago Boxing Day was all the hype in Canada. Most of classmates would stand in line at Best Buy or other retailers to buy some latest console or game disc. Times sure have changed.

At least we got okay laws stopping companies from doing outright scams. An item has to have had the price for a certain time before you can advertise a new lower price as being on sale. They try to skimp around this by slowly increasing the prices in end of october. But then you also have to tell which price you're comparing to, and document that that price is a realistic price in the market. So you can't markup something from $100 to $200, wait a few weeks and say it's now 50% off at $100, if everyone else already was selling it for $100.

The news are also good at pointing out if some big company does something shady, I guess they have journalists trawling stores right now trying to uncover fake deals. Most big box stores have this year already lost a lot of goodwill after news after news broke about how they would try to force employees to not unionize.

Most stores have been indexed by prisjakt.no for quite a few years. So all price history is there, making it easy to see if it's a real offer or not.

Here in Japan, this year is the first time I see "Black Friday" at every real store. It was mostly online event.

The spread of consumerism gives me so much anxiety at a time when everyone especially in the West should concentrate on how to reduce consumption in all parts of their lives :( But satisfying your hunter-gatherer instincts just feels so much better to most people…

That's sooner than I noticed it in America. Before that, it was long the start of the Christmas shopping season, which guaranteed prices would be higher, but selection was wider.

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