Should we get rid of Black Friday?

You will probably have started receiving them already, the enormous pile of emails triggering you to grab your bank card, type in your CVV and press ‘Purchase’, or *the old school way* tempt you to visit stores this weekend. That’s because Black Friday is upon us – the yearly trap, where big corporations try to get millions of people to spend their money on items they do not need. 

For many, this weekend will be a way to stock up on essentials or finally purchase wishlist items that would otherwise be out of their budget. For others, Black Friday is another marketing ploy to sell low-quality or last seasons dead-stock, and will see us bring home items we do not need, and will not use.

This creates a cycle of items that will be placed on reselling platforms (yay), binned (nay) or brought to goodwill bins, which, if not purchased in charity shops, will down the line end up in landfill (again, nay). Not to mention, some of the prices these items are sold at are so low, that it makes you wonder how it is possible for a garment to be made that cheap. The truth is, someone (the maker of your clothes) is paying for it.

After watching the new Netflix documentary, Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, and reading The world is on fire but we are still buying shoes by Alec Leech and Consumed by Aja Barber this year, I have yet again been confronted by non secret facts about the fashion industry. To be able to have new styles available on a seasonal, monthly or even daily bases, GAP, H&M and ZARA produce 12.000, 25.000 and 36.000 items respectively per year. SHEIN surpasses them all, and produces around 1.3 million items a year. The whole fashion industry produces 100 billion pieces of garment a year, and as consumers we are not doing that much better to stop this – the average person wears an item only 7 times before discarding it, contributing significantly to fashion waste.

This year I am doing a deep cleanse of my inbox and have unsubscribed of all incoming ‘Black Friday week’ emails. If I really needed something, I would rather purchase a second-hand item from a vintage store, or on Vinted, to not be part of the endless fast-fashion circus cycle. In a bid to do better, I urge you to do the same; reconsider if you need need the item, and even better, support local and shop small, independent and consciously.

Do you think we should get rid of Black Friday?