Black Friday: The only thing more annoying than the sales day is listening to the people who won't participate in it
Meanwhile, Affairbnb has inevitably become a thing
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Your support makes all the difference.God bless America. God bless its burgers, its technology, its trainers and its sitcoms. God bless its unwavering and lucrative enthusiasm for British accents and period dramas. But God forbid it should come over here and try to change our sacred British shopping habits.
Black Friday is upon us, in case you hadn’t noticed. Black Friday is now “A Thing”, like selfie sticks, competitive pumpkin carving and – time to emigrate – glitter beards. For the past week, every shopping website has been pumping out emails previewing hot deals on memory foam pillows, external hard drives and Hip Hoop Knitting kits (me neither). News outlets have dug out unseemly footage from Black Friday 2014 – held by historians to be the British debut at the consumerist feast – in which UK shoppers scuffled over HD televisions and spent £1m every three minutes.
And now as hangover follows eggnog, the Black Friday backlash has arrived. This year several British retailers, including Asda, Argos and John Lewis, declared themselves out. This has less to do with improving customer experience, one imagines, than an eagerness to cash in on the last-minute festive pound when men and women, but mostly men, sprint around stores grabbing cashmere and truffles at any price as if the middle-class apocalypse were upon them.
More annoying are those shoppers noisily rejecting Black Friday as a tacky import while simultaneously buying an ironic Christmas jumper from Urban Outfitters, hiring a Santa costume or digging out their DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life. But Black Friday is really American, they huff. True: it is the day after Thanksgiving when Americans traditionally stampede to the sales, as many British people do on Boxing Day. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, there is no national holiday today, so why have we bought into it?
Well, why not? It’s Friday and payday too, so productivity is already flatlining. Things are cheaper than usual, which is nice. It might make you start your Christmas shopping earlier, which is useful. If you’re going to buy this stuff anyway, then why not now? And, crucially, nobody is forcing anyone to get involved. If you’re already ignoring billboards and targeted adverts on Facebook, you can probably resist the shops today, too.
The real reason people don’t like Black Friday is that it shows Christmas up for the consumerist scrap it is. But no one likes a Scrooge. So if you want to preserve your festive spirit, either ignore it or treat yourself to that external hard drive you’ve always wanted. Happy holidays.
The end of the affair?
Of course, Affairbnb is here. It turns out that travellers have been using the handy spare room site for hook-ups as well as holidays, and then bragging about it online. Reddit has a whole thread dedicated to tales of Airbnb encounters, from sexy Brazilian house-guests to Cornish one-night stands.
I’ve stayed in Airbnbs all over, from a treehouse at the end of someone’s garden in New Zealand to a giant terrace in Brighton for a hen weekend. But I have never dared to click the Private Room or Shared Room option. I’ve always gone for the unfriendly entire home option, which means neither the home owners nor the idea of having an Affairbnb have crossed my radar. Nor have I ever dared to rent out my flat to travellers – I’m too worried about my favourite mugs, or being landed with a nudist tenant, as happened to a friend last month.
If people want to use the site as a globetrotting dating app, then fine. I just hope it doesn’t ruin it for those who really only want a clean place to sleep. Perhaps Airbnb could come up with some kind of code – like the old pampas grass in the front garden – for travellers with amorous intentions. For the rest of us, a pint of milk in the fridge on arrival will be just fine.
The train is running light
To the list of great visionaries of our time – Steve Jobs, Robert Dyson – I propose an addition: the unsung railway spokesperson. Truly, these are among the most inventive minds of the era, tirelessly coming up with new excuses for late-running trains. Joining leaves on the line and the wrong type of snow is the latest: trains that are not heavy enough. Abellio Greater Anglia services across east England have been affected by trains that are too light to squash the leaves on the line. The leaves build up, cause trains to skid and damage their wheels, leading to two trains a day having to be withdrawn. A knotty problem, but it is at least one passengers can help out with. We should all carry more bags and put on weight: heavier trains, problem solved. You’re welcome, Abellio.
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