Matty Healy muses that modernity has failed us in the song ‘Love It If We Made It’. As I delete the very last Black Friday spam email (deals that will never return! Except in your inbox in approximately 5 hours!) from a perfume shop I had subscribed to in hopes of 10% off, I am prone to this Malthusian claim – modernity has failed us! I’m sure my premodern mailbox wouldn’t be filled with this junk: it seems that this specific form of corporate greed, while not particularly new, is very contemporary to post-internet populations.
As someone from a country where Black Friday once went unrecognised, the limited exposure I had to this concept was from American sitcoms where people would camp outside malls to grab the best possible deals. To my dismay, it grew and mutated to become a months-long event corresponded through newsletters, all for one seismic day. According to research by ReflectDigital, around 70% of the search volume for Black Friday deals begin in October and early November, with interest for them starting as early as August. Post-pandemic, online shopping seems to have monopolised this psychic realm of ‘Black Friday deals’, with Forbes revealing that U.S e-commerce warehouses witnessed a 9.1% increase in sales during Black Friday this year. Black Friday started out as a trend in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when shoppers caused traffic and smog the day after Thanksgiving, to restock and prepare for the holidays. Ever since, it stuck, as it indicated that shop ledgers were going from red (used for losses) to black (profitable!). But somewhere around the liminal period of the 2010s, with the surge of e-commerce platforms, this trend became globalised, even in countries which do not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s now a multi-faceted method of marketing, based on personalised data and a psychological push for exclusivity.
This need for exclusivity, unsurprisingly, leads to a vapid over-consumption of unnecessary items. Yes, you may not need those lilac coloured Lululemon ballerina yoga tights, but what if today was the only day ever in the history of mankind – that you can get them for 25% off?! More tempting, right? Add to cart, baby! And wheel that cart straight into the landfill, apparently. A report by Business Waste UK discloses that a whopping 80% of Black Friday purchases get thrown away, with 52% of consumers facing buyers-regret over previous purchases. If this statistic alone is not grim enough, consider: there’s also 700,000 tonnes of cardboard and plastic packaging waste, and 429,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse emissions in transporting and delivering these goods as well. Overall, the UK faces 1.5 million tonnes of waste created solely by this holiday, for the sake of increased profit margins.
Just how much is too much then? At any other point of time, such a shocking statistic would be enough to make people reconsider, yet only 27% of adult Brits feel ready to boycott Black Friday based on its environmental impacts. Nearing 30% is already a significant amount of people, yet it is not nearly enough. 1.5 million tonnes of inorganic waste (as most polyester or plastic items bought during these sales tend to be) could take nearly 1000 years to decompose. Microplastics in these items, if not treated properly, have also been found to contaminate the environment and cause numerous health problems such as cancers, cardiovascular diseases and more. Particularly insidious is the ‘waste colonialism’ which this contributes to. Waste colonialism is a process in which wealthy countries from the Global North export their plastic and textile waste to countries in the Global South, under the guise of recycling. The catch is that a lot of this waste is mixed with unrecyclable waste, ending up in landfills in these developing nations, ill equipped for proper processing and disposal. This leads to persistent, bioaccumulative toxic (PBTs) contamination from the microplastics in them, affecting waterways and creating hazardous and unsustainable conditions for both people and land.
In the end, from the pearly gates of shopping malls the night after Thanksgiving to the pearly screens of promotion inboxes, the magic of a Black Friday deal has dimmed with Corporate Cinderella’s clock. From deals for the #girlboss in you, to the god-given right to export toxic waste to neo-colonies, where has Black Friday placed us as a species? Will we, homo sapiens, make it, or does the landfill doomsday creep upon us in Amazon trucks? Has modernity truly failed us, or have the persistent tendrils of colonial-capitalist structures become commercialised with 15% off tags? Of all this I’m not sure, but in my attempts to diverge from the fatalistic claims of inevitable human doom, I say: I’d love it if we made it!
Author: Deepanjana Biswas (she/her, @deepan_jana_)
Image credit: (Photo by Cris Faga/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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