I’ve finally arrived at the fifth stage of dealing with Black Friday – acceptance. I no longer yell the denial “Black Friday isn’t a thing!” at my TV, or try to bargain by conceding it is a thing, but only an American thing.
Black Friday’s journey to marketing catch-phrase started in the ’50s in Philadelphia, when locals started to use the expression to describe the horrendous traffic jams that happened the day after U.S. Thanksgiving as people flooded into the city for the annual Army-Navy football game. Despite the chaos, those football fans were a boon to local stores, hotels and restaurants.
In the late ’80s savvy marketers took Black Friday nation-wide, and crafted a new origin story around the not-exactly-true claim that it was the busiest shopping day of the year and the point when – driven by holiday spending – store balance sheets moved into the black.
Black Friday soon spawned other so-called “retail holidays” such as Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.
Here in B.C. we’ve got Buy Local Week (Nov. 27 to Dec. 3), a creation of municipalities and business groups on the Lower Mainland that’s been spreading across the province over the past six years. The Sunshine Coast hasn’t officially signed on, but that doesn’t mean we can’t join in as we do our holiday shopping.
The Coast’s potters, crafters, bakers, honey producers, makers of eco-friendly cosmetics and clothing are well represented at various events.
The Sunshine Coast’s brick-and-mortar stores include great places to buy clothing, toys, books, and specialty foods.
If you like alcoholic beverages, or need some for entertaining, you could probably serve something different from local producers on each of the 12 days of Christmas.
“Canadians spend about $1,500 on travel, dining, clothing, food and gifts at this time of year,” says the press release announcing this year’s Buy Local Week, which explains the goal is to “make sure that money benefits their communities, since every dollar spent locally keeps 45 cents in the community.”
I’ve got a deadline looming, so I’ll let those numbers stand as claimed. I would, however, like to mention a benefit of buying local we’re sometimes shy about bringing up as journalists.
In a place like the Sunshine Coast, some of that 45 cents out of every dollar that stays in the community buys the ads that help support the work we do as reporters.
And just one final thought. Buying local goes hand-in-hand with giving local.
The Elves Club has its annual telethon and firefighter boot drive Saturday from 2 to 10 p.m. (the show is on Coast TV, channel 10 on the Coast Cable system), Sunshine Coast Secret Santa is taking donations online at sunshinecoastsecretsanta.com, Salvation Army Kettles are out, and the food banks can get a lot of mileage out of a cash donation at this time of year.
