Hi Lovelies,

Welcome back! And welcome if You are new here xo

Hope life is treating You well. Quick post to explain why I decided not to participate in Black Friday sales from now on. After long thinking sesh I came to realize it creates mindless consumerism, benefits no one except big corporations and puts pressure on small brands and businesses to discount heavily when they can’t really afford to – all while struggling to keep surviving after excruciating last three years.

Black Friday as a concept came to Ireland and EU in the last few years only, but it quickly turned into not only one day but the whole month event. Buy X and save Y% on it! We are bombarded with ads whether we want it or not, pushing things we didn’t even know existed. While it is tempting to save a few percent off the original price, I think we forget to ask ourselves if we really needed that thing in the first place? I wonder how many of us have consumer’s hangover afterwards?

Ireland does not have Thanksgiving either, so the videos of people not only queuing from dawn but also trampling over one another for the sake of sales, exactly one day after giving thanks for everything they have, never sat right with me.

If You are keeping Your eye on the prices, You might notice the prices of the goods suddenly creep up about two months prior, and when November comes around, ta-dah, You “get a huge savings”. I haven’t noticed much of this in the clean beauty scene, more in other areas like tech. I also witness clothing shops pull out  their regular stock temporarily and fill the store spaces with junk no one wants anyway. This was confirmed many times over by multiple people.

The biggest winners from Black Friday are the big corporations, it is certainly not the small independent high street shops who after the last three years are under excruciating pressure to survive and are the very ones who can least afford to offer discounts but can feel pressurised into doing so.

No judgement towards the brands/ shops for doing so, if You feel it is the right thing to do for You.

But I am choosing to step out of this and give small businesses my full support. Any time of the year.

One thing to ponder on:

“We cannot create something from nothing, we live on a finite planet, so eventually we will run out of stuff to consume (and in the process we will have done a fairly decent job of destroying our natural environment)”.

What if we honestly asked ourselves if we need the stuff we buy over Black Friday? In majority of the cases we do have enough.

So imagine my delight at discovering the resistance movement called Buy Nothing Day – see more here.

Ethical Influencers list additional 6 reasons to boycott it here.

 

That’s it for today. No shade to anyone, this is my personal choice and an invitation to think and discussion.

 

Sending LOVE & LIGHT,

Renata.

see everything I own