We can’t afford Black Friday

Green is the new black – the 1p price tag says so, writes Kate Hughes

The little black dress – with a big impact. But not in the way you might hope (Getty/iStock)

There are two types of people in this world.

There are those who worship at the Black Friday altar, praying fervently for that bargain of a lifetime because it will surely deliver all their hopes and dreams in one cut-price package.

And there are those for whom such mindless, frenzied nonsense brings them out in hives.

I’m a fully paid up member of the former, obviously. Or at least I would be if I’d suffered a serious blow to the head.

Like a third of the British population (and growing) I buy nothing at all on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, or whatever other day retailers attempt to hang artificial significance on, in an effort to boycott the whole miserable affair.

One of the most offensive things about it all is that the bargains shoppers going looking for just don’t exist. But don’t take my ever-so-slightly biased word for it.

Consumer group Which? does an eye-opening piece of research at about this time each year that works out what proportion of the goods on ‘offer’ in Black Friday sales are available at the same price or cheaper at other times of the year.

The answer for 2021 was 99.5 per cent.

Not half, or even a convincing majority. Almost every single thing you pick up in the Black Friday sale is either the same price or more expensive than it otherwise might be.

In other words, all those people exerting a massive amount of time, effort and money to furnish the people they love with Christmas gifts they want them to enjoy without breaking the bank are being conned more severely than the most cynical of us could have imagined.

But price point BS is not actually what gets on my wick the most in Black Friday week. That spot is reserved for the avalanche of press releases crowing about ultra cheap items. I really do mean ultra cheap. Black Friday 2019 may have been the year of the 7p dress but last week I got notification of a 1p toy.

And that rings far more alarm bells than the sight of little old ladies flinging surprisingly robust handbags at each other in pursuit of a flat-screen telly bigger than both of them put together.

Blame inflation, but the days when 1p was a useful sum are long gone. A penny sweet now laughs in the face of false advertising rules.

In the week when the watchword is ‘value’, an item whose worth, monetarily at least, is set at 1p or 7p or even a sweaty fistful of coppers is not a trophy. It’s not a symbol of triumph over the retail world.

It’s a sign of worthlessness, of the dismissal of our hard earned cash and the literal rubbishing of an item’s entire back story of resource use, as well as its future in any capacity other than landfill. It says so right there on the price tag.

In many ways that 1p toy sums up the problem we’ve got as consumers. We are so disconnected from the process of production that we forget everything – absolutely everything – has an environmental impact, and therefore must be assigned a value in its use.

Not least because you can rest assured that somewhere, somehow, at some point, we will pay for it.

That’s not an easy attitude shift – especially when, to my knowledge, there isn’t a single economy in the world that factors natural capital – the foundation of natural resources that every aspect of our lives and economies are built upon – into its economic reporting of the past, or forecasting for the future.

Think about the enormity of that one for too long and heart palpitations quickly become part of your day, but luckily the dangerous insanity of Black Friday doesn’t need a PhD in economic theory or decades of environmental research to call out and counter.

Of course, selling a 7p dress or a 1p toy as part of a wider sales strategy feels painfully out of date when the retail world is otherwise falling over itself to flog its eco credentials to an increasingly eco-anxious shopper.

But I reckon there’s a trick we can’t afford to miss here. If we can swerve the psychological warfare and acknowledge that everything has a value – that nothing is valueless – the consumption game can change very quickly indeed. When we attribute value to something we keep it, and care for it and fix it when it’s broken. Like we all used to do once upon a time.

Whenever I’m asked what the biggest thing I’ve learned from going zero is – the nickname we’ve given the process of trying to be a bit more green every day – that’s always my response – that everything has a value and that treating it as such solves a whole bunch of problems overnight.

Follow the thought process through and that reduce, reuse, recycle mantra swims quickly into focus – dramatically easing the pressure on both the natural world and our own bank accounts. It’s a bit of a Christmas miracle if not a very original Black Friday epiphany.

So here’s my takeaway from this week: none of us can afford a 1p toy.