Black Friday: When you cloak your finances in bargain funeralwear

LIKE many other things, it's Takealot's fault that this nonsense was dragged into South Africa. Black Friday. First it was Guy Fawkes, Valentine's Day, then Halloween, and then Mother's Day, also Father's Day, and these days people even do Easter gifts.

I'm ashamed to say my mother and grandmother would have said something like: Yes, it's just another damn [antisemitic slur here] money-making scheme. In mitigation I rush to declare that my ancestors were otherwise besotted with anybody of Jewish ancestry. You could hardly utter any other kind of derogatory word about the Chosen People. Jesus was, after all, Jewish.

Be that as it may, these days it's the Boere and Dutchmen of Takealot and Checkers who work our bile. In 2014, Takealot held the first Black Friday locally, and overnight everyone had cottoned on to what it was and how it worked. As if struck by lightning. Guys who couldn't remember five rivers in a row in grade 6 geography could now rattle off product lists of a dozen things, whizz complex addition problems, and do percentages off the cuff.

South Africa does not hold back

We've seen on television how a wobbling crowd stormed a K-Mart's sliding door early in the morning to get to the bargains, and we are definitely not going to be shown up by them. Thousands and thousands of rand are going to be saved in a rush on Black Friday, come hell or high water.

But how wholesome are the roots of this grotesque celebration of buy, buy, buy? After all, we're talking about the black plague, blackmail, black sheep and a black mood. No-good stuff.

The story has been told since forever that Black Friday was a term used by American slave traders to refer to the day after American Thanksgiving when they would sell slaves at a discount.

However, several reliable sources dismiss this as nonsense.

It’s just football, stupid

The probable story is much less sensational. It's actually about a squad of traffic police who were annoyed by the annual traffic chaos surrounding the football game between the army and navy teams in the American military in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is played every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Since the 1950s, every jackass with wheels within a 500 km radius had already descended on the city by the Friday, and it didn't take them long to get to the beer. And so, apart from the poor security workers having their hands full every year, the stores filled their cash registers.

By the 1980s, American retailers nationwide had started calling the day Black Friday, and were coming up with breathtaking bargains just to turn the last bit of inventory into hard cash before all their customers park off with a Budweiser over Christmas time. This is also where the myth originated that it's actually the last chance in the year for a retailer to get their books out of the red and into the black. Black Friday. No way, unconvincing, you retailers.

What is beyond doubt is the fact that Black Friday is very effective at getting consumers off their backsides and in among the shelves. Although statistics have slightly flattened out in the past few years, especially after Covid, the retail world has become addicted to this annual graph peak.

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We Saffas love our cheap stuff ...

Economists say South African consumers have been under severe pressure for ten years, and therefore the Black Friday focus, unlike in the rest of the world, has shifted from big-ticket items like televisions and refrigerators to groceries. The Grobler kids might have to make do with their 2009 Xbox for a few more years, but they're at least playing FIFA with the flavour of lamb shank with garlic and rosemary lingering in their gills.

One way to measure the success of Black Friday is by comparing November sales (usually the second-strongest month of the year) with December sales (the strongest month). According to News24, 2019 was South Africa's Black Friday peak, with nationwide retail sales in November at R109 billion, 13% lower than December's R126 billion.

By 2023, the piranha attack had receded to R105 billion in November, 20% lower than the R130 billion in December. Economists expect, however, that 2024 will bring the strongest Black Friday in at least the past four years, with interest rates heading downwards again, fuel prices having dropped significantly, and the massive cash withdrawal from the insurance industry with the advent of the two-pot retirement legislation. The expectation is that smaller electrical accessories like air fryers will show deep price cuts, as well as groceries.

There’s actually another crooked story

There's another story about the origin of Black Friday, which goes much further back in history. The panic of 1869. It was the day when two cunning billionaires, Jay Gould and James Fisk, used their contacts in Pres. Ulysses S. Grant's administration to manipulate the gold price so they could control the entire gold market.

Grant, who was nobody's fool, caught wind of it and ordered his treasury officials to sell a large amount of gold, which undermined the upside price and even caused an 18% drop. It was a wild day – some became instantly rich, but many financial bulls had their tails tied in knots. The president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was among them.

All attempts to contact an occult-expert like former anti-pop music crusader, Rodney Seale, or the former head of SAPS's occult-related unit, Col. Kobus Jonker, to investigate the potential dark spiritual connotations of Black Friday, had come to naught by the time of publication.

♦ VWB ♦

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