Originally posted by Alastor the Stylish

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Originally posted by Rydain

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Buy Nothing Day

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Lordy lord lord. That is the stupidest idea ever. You're not hurting the corporations at all, because they don't exactly do a daily count of merchandise purchased, and people are just going to buy the same stuff before/after anyway. How this does anything to help is just beyond me.

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Originally posted by Rydain

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You seem to be getting Buy Nothing Day confused with the 24-hour gasoline boycott that makes its rounds via email on occasion. That really is pointless because if you drive a gas-burning car, you can't opt out of buying gasoline, and you're going to have to buy it sometime anyway. As I mentioned before, I would not take BND to the ridiculous extreme of refusing to buy something I needed and would have just bought on any other day (gas, food, etc.) However, both of the premises you use for insulting the idea of BND are flawed.

Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year in the United States, and retailers do in fact care about how much money they make on that day. This is why they go to such lengths to entice massive crowds of people into their stores. It is not just a matter of a few stores having sales at the same time. I have also never seen sleazeball moneymaking tactics taken to such an extreme on any normal sale weekend. On Black Friday, retailers will commonly offer a very limited supply of expensive merchandise at an unusually deep discount. The idea is that people will gather in hordes to storm the store trying to get their mitts on that stuff. Regardless of whether or not they score a 50% discounted plasma TV, they will likely buy other merchandise, which is not discounted. Now, enticing people into the store with sales is standard business procedure, but the idea of encouraging stressed-out mobs of people to choke the store all day long seems excessive to me, especially because it brings out impolite and dangerous human behavior - anything from line cutting to trampling and knocking down others to getting into fist fights over that last Xbox. It disgusts me that people allow themselves to get so worked up over some stupid nonessential item.

Furthermore, the average consumer can very well be enticed to buy something that they would not have otherwise purchased just because it is on sale. They don't think about whether or not they really want it, how they would use it, etc. All they see is a massive discount that they might not come across ever again, so they think they're saving a boatload of money.

The point is that on Black Friday, by and large, people don't go out and take advantage of LOW LOW PRICES to get things they had already planned on buying. They go out and buy because they are conditioned to - because they have a Pavlovian reaction to retailers' tricks. Even if Buy Nothing Day does not currently put a massive dent in retailers' bottom lines on major shopping days, it is a conversation starter. Over time, if more people think about why they shop, they may be less inclined to waste time, money, and stress on gewgaws that they neither need nor want.

As I said earlier, I don't have anything against Black Friday shopping per se. If you get a great deal on something you would have ordinarily bought, and you don't lower yourself to the level of some ill-behaved troglodyte in the process, that's all fine and dandy. My opinion would better be represented by "If you go shopping on a major day for retailers, think about what you're buying instead of just drooling over a sale tag and, above all, don't be an asshole" Day.

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Originally posted by KATW

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I just dont go out on Black Friday... nothing big...

Besides... stores are scary enough to keep me away in the first place...

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Originally posted by E

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I'm banned.

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Originally posted by

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I'm banned.

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