Black Friday

Why do they call it Black Friday? I asked chatGPT and its unconvincing answer was that people used to do so much shopping that the police or enforcement said that it was a black day, i.e. it is a bad day to work. The term was then supposedly hijacked by capitalism and applied commercially. Yeah, I don’t buy the explanation too.

And I don’t buy much things on Black Friday anymore. I was first aware about it around 15 years ago as it was a thing in Germany. I was a student at that time and gadgets played a big role. Nowadays, not so much. Also living in a house that is limited in space, with three growing kids, made me realise how much space can one item take, and it can affect our mental capacity. The space being crowded suffocates me a bit, and the fact that I need to clear some space before doing certain tasks, makes day-to-day tasks, tedious. Also our life has stabilised a bit, in the sense the kids are no longer toddlers or babies, as these stages normally require a lot of things to ‘operate’; diapers, milk bottle, stepping stools, to name a few.

Also when I first moved here, everything needed to be bought. Anything that needs to be done, such as cooking for example, needs utensils that can easily be ordered from Amazon. I really needed them. But after a while, these other new things are not necessary but still useful, as it helps speed things up. Then after a while, if I were to buy new things/tools, the benefits from the purchase are not longer that huge, and I realised that I just need to do the thing. An example is an iron. At first I need an iron for my clothes, as I can’t do it any other way. Then I upgraded to a steam iron, which speeds ironing 3-5 times faster. Then there’s the possibility of getting industrial level steam iron set, but that would probably makes it 10-50% faster, but at a great cost (space, money, and even time to set it up).

Once we realise that buying is not the only answer, we can ask other questions. Like what does Black Friday mean?

Thank you for reading.