Happy Black Friday
We will continue to discuss the ongoing apocalypse, and then we’ll get back to brighter text, promise.
One of my close people took one look at the sales going on and commented, correctly, that it felt like a monthlong Black Friday, our most cursed holiday. After then, prices go up 10% across the board, everywhere, for no good reason other than a guy got mad once. Also, I was chatting with my bankruptcy attorney friend the other day and she said that she got 58 new cases in a month, so everything appears to be going fine on a societal level.
And so therefore the mending, the skill shares, the not buying as resistance. But also: the noticing of time-sensitive deals, of feeling rushed in making load-bearing decisions, in stockpiling Sichuan peppercorns and nothing else. If there was ever a time for a mass boycott it would be now. Protests are never enough. We tried those, remember? And now we are here, right?
“Lengthy Black Friday” is what people want actual Black Friday to be, but it is never that way. Instead, the sales ramp up. There are pre-sales, promises that the price in October will actually be the same as the Black Friday price. Then why isn’t it always that way, you wonder.
Stories are traded about the best “last thing” you bought. Laptop, SSD, car (car!), a smuggled Switch 2, an ungodly amount of peppercorns, pants. You realize that shincha is available now and buy enough to last through the summer, then wonder whether this will be your last shincha. You remember that “recession” is just a soft way of saying “depression.” You learn how to mend pants.
In the meantime, you check some websites for Black Friday sales. It’s April, but why not. You discover that everything you want is sold out, everywhere, which feels freeing.