France is looking at banning Black Friday sales: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/black-friday-france-ban-environment-waste-sales-deals-a9225381.html
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Thumbs down from me!
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Well Halloween is not a new thing in Australia, we moved into our area 18 years ago and Halloween has always been celebrated. Houses are decorated and kids come around from 4pm till 8pm to get their lollies. My son is 20 now so doesn’t participate, but him and others from his generation have never experienced a year when Halloween hasn’t been celebrated. So if something has been going for at least 20 years, i’d call it established already.
Anyway as the Scottish guy across the road points out each year, Halloween is a Scottish tradition, not American, they have just embraced it like we have.
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Here is a post I made in October last year regarding Hallowen.
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Halloween, celebrated on the eve of All
Saints, is, to put it roughly, the belief that on the night of the 31 of October the planets would be aligned in such a way as to enable the souls of the dear departed to find a way back to earth and look up their families and friends ( much to the terror of those, I would suppose).
In time most of the origins of ‘feast’ days will be forgotten.
Already, with Christmas, children wait
for Santa to come on Christmas Eve, and bring them presents, and not for the baby Jesus to be born: the best present we could ever get: Emmanuel,
God with us.
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It seems that our Australian retailers are getting desperate to sell, sell, sell. Any excuse for a sale or promotion. There now seems to be a culture of sales, and we dodder and stumble from one to the next.
I suspect that shoppers are so inundated and inculcated by all these sales that they are now by and large trained to wait for the next sale before buying anything of consequence.
If it continues, we will get to the point where the “SALE” and “REDUCED” signs will never come down.
As for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it is a sad indictment of Australian retailing that they can’t come up with more appropriate local reasons for sales like 'Federation Friday", or “Over 40 (degrees) Fortnight”, or “Mate’s Rates Monday”.
We used to be innovative. Once. We don’t have emulate the mythical lemmings’ march and follow on regardless.
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That is already the case at Robin’s Kitchen and Strandbags.
And has anyone come across a tyre brand/retailer in recent times not offering “Buy three tyres and get the fourth one free”?
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The US started the perpetual sale retail culture decades ago and we dutifully emulate it today. Want to see our ‘next future’, look at the US today. Not so ‘pretty’ in many ways 
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The Flintstones? (2D original)
The Jetsons?
I’m still waiting for the “flux capacitor” to arrive.
Any other vision of US reality ended shortly after the last episode of Seinfeld; Some might suggest alternately the last episode of Mash; Others the day the USA pulled out of the war in Vietnam.
It’s interesting how Hollywood and the current popular made for TV series productions struggle with everyday consumer realities.
IE
Rags to Riches is still a dream of many. However the few real life exceptions embodied in any movie or programming are very unlikely and rare events.
And the reality of climate change, the current debate or future alternate Armageddons, all seem too unpalatable a topic.
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I buy some products from a small start up type cosmeceuticals online place…puts the top winners of global cosmeceuticals competitions into their products and so kept hair on my head during years of corticosteroid asthma ‘preventer’ …it exacerbates it. Company is reviv serums.
So with a newsletter I track them and getting 30% off was a good…Needed it.
Kitchenwarehouse has its usual discounts…but stock in that had been out of stock for a while. I watch and get newsletters so know if it’s a genuine deal.
I bought a wrought iron australian made solidteknics pan, no rivets that has a multi century warranty. Can be seasoned to non stick as has been done for 3000 years. Non stick pans and non stick fast slow cookers are very bad.
In Aus retail sales are right down. The economy is bad, there is mortgage stress in 40% of people with mortgages. Companies need to sell.[quote=“TheBBG, post:20, topic:19282, full:true”]
The topic is tips.
A tip about the American Black Friday sales are that they are reliably the best sale prices found +/- months of the ‘Black Friday’ or ‘Cyber Monday’ events. Buy something on a BF/CM sale and you probably won’t find it for that price again until at least the post Christmas sales that tend to feature mostly left over unsold often out-of-season merchandise, if then.
OTOH it is a game retailers play here, not exactly like BF/CM in the USA.
A few merchants get a few extra dollars in their pockets by playing their own game. I’ll use Chemistwarehouse as an example; they had 10% off their normal prices for everything as their Black Friday sale. As soon as it was over many items were more highly discounted in the Christmas catalogue. An item normally $12.99 at CW ($2.00 off RRP) was $11.69 for Black Friday and $10.69 in the Christmas catalogue starting the day after. I will remember this next year and give them a miss until their Christmas catalogue.
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It’s terrible. Govt kept defunding CSIRO which kept producing world first business innovations for Aus…like csiroset, this is reason woollen socks can be machine washed and never shrink or mat. Same with sweaters,
All our cookware, pots pans woks come from overseas, all crap, most non stick which is dangerously unhealthy. Look at Solidteknics.com.au. Made in Sydney and could last 500 years. Patented, best in world, chefs love them.
Cheer up. Have an Australia stamped in and hearts, wrought iron made for 3000 years, and no nickel steel which does not leach poisons.
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You don’t “save” 30% if goods are discounted by 30% - you “spend” 70%!
That said - if you are going to buy those same goods anyway, then you are saving money - because without these specials you would have paid full price.
I just did that, this week - bought 2 items I’ve been wanting for 12 months, and instead of paying a total of $4350, I’ve “saved” $950. Without the discount, I probably would never have bought the more expensive one of those two items, and I would have paid $200 extra on the other one. So in my example, the saving is genuine.
Where it’s not, is when these offers suck you in - and induce you to buy things you weren’t going to buy anyway - or items that perhaps you would never have even thought of buying, which is even worse.
A friend of mine is on a pension and she’s an amazing shopper. She gets discounts on stuff that wasn’t even being discounted, simply by being a good bargainer and a smooth talker. She also tempts stores by chatting to her friends first, to see if they are after the same item. This gives her the advantage of combined buying power. Yesterday, she went to a major electrical & furnishings store and bought something which was already on special, and got the price knocked down a further $4, from $34 to $30 - simply by buying 4 of them, instead of only 1. Added to the discount the store was already offering, this made the price ridiculously low.
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Ironically today Friday 13th, Dec 2019, has arrived. It really is a “black Friday” in the traditional sense.
Anyone seen anything on sale today?
For retailers of course Friday 13th in a true blue Aussie sense is a bit of a random event. We might have one in February and another exactly 4 weeks later in March.
Perish the thought that retailers would need to hold sales based on the random alignment of calendar dates, or any other imagined alignment of the heavens.
I guess all Aussies have a choice. One is to become like the USA. To marvel in the revelation that the world owes so much to a date in late November. A date where an intrepid bunch of settlers celebrated their feat of survival and religious convictions.
It would be perhaps much more relevant if Australian retailers could find some more relevant dates to our nations survival, or respectfully the very first to arrive. There are so many key events or dates in our history that should stand out. Some bathed in sorrow and others in achievement. Of course we have yet to turn Anzac Day or Australia Day into “Sale Days”. Perhaps there is some wisdom remaining?
For true blue sale days perhaps the date the first fleet turned up in Botany Bay in the wrong place and a week early for Australia Day might be a good choice. We got it wrong and are overstocked sale day. It could set the tone for every sale for the rest of the year. Or should we continue to ignore our own history and import the traditions of far away lands few of us have any connection with? It may seem simpler given our inability to confront our own more recent history in full!
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Have you checked out Robin’s Kitchen and Strandbags yet?
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Other countries have their own way of doing things, but I love the way in Au we have a simple explanation of the reason of the sale: stocktake, end of season, closing down…
Would the day after the celebration of Au Day be a good reason for a sale? Maybe so, but not a very logical one IMHO.
Let’s safeguard our identity even in our
diversity 
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Yes, last week. Is this weeks any different? Don’t want to miss a bargain? 
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Some of the psychology used to lure us with time limited online ‘sales’.
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Sales are both boring and meaningless. If theres something you really really want and you know what RRP is and you can see that its a genuine sale price… go ahead. Otherwise, dont bother, because there will be another sale next week, next month or even tomorrow.
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An article regarding Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales with some input from Choice.
