The Meaning of Black Friday is Lost in the Sea of Marketing and Profit

Thanksgiving has evolved into more than just a day of feasting and family gatherings.Thanksgiving Day is becoming the day before Black Friday, meaning "in the black" or "profitable" (Benjamin R. Barber 391). Stores are staying open for pre-Black Friday sales rather than staying closed for the holiday. The retail and marketing industries try to do everything they can to advertise or build new malls to shop at. On every holiday, they find reasons for people to shop. There are four non-working days and ninety-six hours of shopping the weekend after Thanksgiving. All major holidays are becoming days and reasons to shop.

TV and radio stations claim that Black Friday is the result of government spending and an increase in profit. Moms agree that one day isn't enough time to do all of their shopping, and dads think that stores should stay open the day after Thanksgiving because they can't get enough of the stores low prices. Stores continue to do Black Friday because they are giving their customers what they want. Benjamin R. Barber says that people like to shop, but not all the time. He says, "Black Friday is a supply-side phenomenon that is the result of corporations "pushing", not "pulling" (Benjamin R. Barber).

Marketing and advertising are the main things that get people to buy the things being sold, have increased by a quarter of a trillion dollars every year, and are what encourage shopaholism. Shopaholism is a serious problem for more than twenty million Americans who regularly go shopping with no purpose. Rather than meet the real needs and wants, capitalism produces needs and wants to sell all of the goods, whether they are wanted or not, and must sell to stay in business. Real needs such as clean water in third-world countries go unmet, while bottled water, a manufactured need, is pushed on the first-worlders who have free water from the tap.

Black Friday is not a day to please its consumers; it is used to please its shareholders, who benefit from the people buying the goods. It pushes consumers to buy things they don't need so the companies can make more money. Soon there will be nothing left of Thanksgiving and all it represents. The people who live for Black Friday need to learn that the stores that have low prices on things are not doing us favors; they are doing it to benefit themselves. Black Friday has never been a big part of my life.

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