Black Friday: hype and facts

Unsurprisingly, Black Friday originated in the USA. Black Friday has long been the day with the highest turnover in the retail sector. Traditionally, the hustle and bustle of Christmas sales begins in the last week of November after Thanksgiving. In 1941, the American president moved Thanksgiving forward in order to extend the pre-Christmas business for retailers by a week. The media are familiar with the queues outside the stores waiting for the starting gun to go off and then the tumultuous scenes of the crowds racing for the doorbuster deals.

But that's not all: Singles Day has also been establishing itself here for the past two years. This originally comes from Chinese youth culture, as a kind of counterpart to Valentine's Day. The repetition of the number one on the calendar day of 11 November is a reminder of being alone. In China, people meet up for dinner, in bars and for karaoke on this day. In this sense, Chinese singles also like to treat themselves to something on this date in order to console themselves for being alone.

Price comparisons are a must, and the promise of a "killer deal" should be countered with research time on price comparison platforms or search engines. Paradoxically, there is massive advertising with discounts and comparative prices during the Cyber Days, but very often the offer does not stand up to a real price comparison. The advertising slogan often compares cabbage and turnips. A non-binding and possibly outdated price recommendation from a manufacturer often has nothing to do with the actual market price.

Supposed bargains are very often not cheaper at all, so scepticism is advisable. Consumer magazines and organisations have often documented the prices before, on Black Friday and in the weeks after. The results are sobering. In a study initiated by ZDF, around 3000 products in the weeks before, during and after Black Friday did not show any major price reductions compared to the daily specials. The sales platform Idealo calculated the average sector-independent saving on Black Friday at 4%. You can easily get a discount like this with other promotions or through normal price fluctuations throughout the year. The Chamber of Labour's (Arbeiterkammer) price monitor shows that for almost a third of items, the same Black Friday promotional goods were already available at a better price elsewhere in regular sales on the day of the offer.

Dropshippers do not even have the goods in stock, but usually order from the Far East. Customer service can therefore be disastrous - returns are often unreasonable or impossible. Having to send return parcels to China with an uncertain outcome would discourage customers from ordering. On the European-looking website, it is hard to find out that it works with dropshipping. In addition, the price would have been better anyway if the order had been placed directly on the online marketplace without the diversions via dropshipping. This is because many dropshipping retailers place orders in their own webshop, as orders with Alibaba and Co, and add a retailer margin.

Shopping on Black Friday and the like is not just a bad idea from an economic point of view. Apart from the supposed savings from dubious discounts, impulse purchases lead to people buying things on impulse that they would not otherwise have bought. This puts more strain on the wallet than an alleged discount and the satisfaction of the impulse purchase soon evaporates.