The Resistible Rise of Black Friday

Erik Brunar

When the smell of roasting chestnuts starts filling downtown Caldas da Rainha in October, the bus-stop ads for “Black Friday” in Enligsh stand out like a UFO in Parque D. Carlos. How did this phenomenon, a product of American consumer culture, land here? And do businesses have to rely on this kind of ploy to survive?

In the decades after World War II, many trends made their way over from the USA to Western Europe because they promised a more casual and inventive lifestyle. These fads bolstered commerce and projected soft power. But Black Friday is just a slightly cringe-inducing side-effect of a purely American holiday, Thanksgiving. Yet it has taken hold here as an exhortation to consumer excess.

One of the reasons for its adoption may be that by law, retailers are allowed to hold sales on up to 124 days per year. A third of all days could belong to a sales period. That has some merchants scratching their heads for pretexts to use up all those days. Black Friday fits into these plans in the same way it does in the US, as a kick-off for the December shopping season.

The first common use of the term “Black Friday” for an autumn Friday not referring to a stock market crash (see: crash of 1869) was around 1960 when police officials in Philadelphia described the traffic chaos on the Friday after Thanksgiving with shoppers starting their year-end gift buying and fans converging for the fabled Army-Navy football game. The term caught on. In the 1980s, American retailers managed to rebrand the Friday’s blackness as a reference to a self-serving urban legend: that the crowds on that day finally swung stores from operating at a loss to making a profit for the year.
Global expansion began in the 2000s. In Portugal it started in the 2010s with multinational retailers Amazon, Fnac, and MediaMarkt. The phenomenon kept growing in space, with new retail chains joining each year, and in time, with Black Week or Black Month trialed by bolder merchants–or those who wanted the crowds, but more spread out. A longer period also accommodates more thoughtful shopping. However, this particular trend shows signs of receding.

How sure can one be of the deals to be had? By law, an item’s sale price must be lower than its lowest price in the last 30 days, and the labeling must show this base price. Articles first introduced during a sale have to be labeled Promotion and must be discounted from their regular price after the sale.

On an overcast Thursday in mid October, I walked around downtown Caldas for three hours to interview owners or employees of fifteen stores selling clothes, jewelry, leather goods, household goods, and cosmetics.

The survey’s results were blunt. Two out of the fifteen were doing something for Black Friday: a gothy teen makeup store and a sneaker store, both part of chains. The other 13 were locally owned. Almost half never even have sales. They manage their inventory carefully and cultivate clients through their curation and their integrity. Some of these businesses have retained customers for over four decades, regulars from the days when Caldas was a commercial magnet that pulled in shoppers from Lisbon and Santarém.

A couple of people told me about those heady times before the big shopping centers came to Amoreiras, Carnide, and Loures, when Lisboans would swarm Caldas every weekend for that downtown shopping feel, that slightly old-timey, neighborly atmosphere. They visited their preferred stores as they would members of their family. They filled up on fruta at the eponymous Praça. When that traffic dropped off in the 2000s, the city made efforts to help the central business district. A financial crisis and a pandemic later, the area is blossoming again.

Not 15 minutes away on foot, I stepped into the buzzing second floor of La Vie, Caldas’s big urban shopping mall. I took my questions to the fifteen shops on that level selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, and cosmetics. Seven of the eight shops I managed to survey in my 90 minutes there are having Black Friday events again this year. The most recent convert has only been participating for two years, but many are part of chains that have been doing it for much longer. Only the lingerie store was not taking part. Everybody agreed that the day was always exceptionally busy. Only two places were planning to extend the event to the weekend or to the week.

Reflected in the stories that the clerks, managers, and owners told that day was a tale of two commercial cultures that stand apart and regard each other as somewhat alien. What about the shoppers? How often do they go between the two worlds?

For those fed up with the commercialization of life, the artist Ted Dave invented an alternative celebration for the Friday after the last Thursday in November: you can examine the issue of overconsumption on Buy-Nothing Day by organizing a credit-card cutting party or an empty-shopping-cart parade.