Can someone jog my memory on Black Friday? Where did it come from and is its name from some sort of reference to so many bruises after everything's finished?
Wikipedia.
But actually Black Friday as an annual thing is just the retail industry desperate to foster in adults the same freakish unthinking greed they grew out of as children. Retailers could avoid the whole Black Friday madness if they just let you pay online on Friday and pick up the item in store the following week. But they have an interest in maintaining the atmosphere of scarce opportunity that turns normal people into savages. If a person did all this he'd probably be fined or jailed for inciting civil unrest.
I think we should send retailers a message, by refusing to buy anything except necessities (food, fuel, rent, utilities) between Oct 1 and Jan 1. Visit family during the holidays, but buy any presents in Jan-Feb that you want to give each other. Heck, give up on the idea of a gift-exchanging holiday at all. If you find something great that someone you know would love to have, and it's a good price, pick it up for them. They'll reciprocate eventually. Childrens' gifts can still be done during xmas to feed their emotional health if you think it's worthwhile, but we could easily cut holiday gift spending to 1/10th without affecting children much.
Especially egregious are fucking car commercials. Who buys someone a luxury car for xmas? Ridiculous.
We also need to stop giving each other gift cards. Nothing says "I only know a little about you and am uncomfortable asking mutual friends about you, or else I just don't care that much about you but I don't want to be ostracized by our social group" like handing someone a little bit of cash they can only spend at one store. Just the act of buying a gift card is stupid, exchanging optimally useful money for far less useful money with no other benefit for the buyer. Occasionally you see a store offering a deal, like Half Price Books giving a $5 scrip when you buy a $25 gift card (but the scrip can be used only next January). You sometimes see a +20% deal. I suspect they end up making money off gift cards that get lost or forgotten or expire, offsetting the rebate and attracting more interest than a 1:1 gift card deal. If you buy a $25 HPB gift card, but don't give the person the $5 scrip (or worse, you give them the scrip instead!), they're going to wonder why you didn't give both. In any case, buying the gift card so you can later spend it, gaining money value in exchange for restricting where you can spend it, is acceptable. Giving someone a gift card is still crass and dumber than just giving paper money.