Shopping on Black Friday also meets with criticism
The Black Friday discount battle has begun. But while some people pounce on the bargains, others criticize the consumer mania. They say that impulse often wins out over reason when it comes to bargains.
Fundraising campaigns, swap meets or counter posters: Not all Swiss retail and online retailers are joining in on Black Friday. "Anyone who campaigns for fair prices and sustainable production all year round cannot endorse this marketing ploy," writes the Fashion Revolution association, for example, which campaigns for a fair and ecological fashion industry, on its website.
Instead, he has launched "Colorful Friday," in which participating stores can voluntarily donate 10 percent of their daily sales to a meaningful project. For customers, however, the prices remain the same.
Also on the so-called "Fair Friday", around 160 stores, including for example the bookseller Orell Füssli, give their customers the opportunity to forgo a discount and instead donate an amount in favor of Caritas.
"In Switzerland, more than half a million people, including 100,000 children, live in poverty," says the website of the campaign, which was launched by the French-speaking Swiss bookseller Payot.
Swapping instead of buying is the order of the day at the bag brand Freitag: it is taking action against excessive consumption with a platform on which customers can swap their bags with each other. The online store, on the other hand, will be completely shut down on Black Friday.
Environment and workers suffer
Criticism of Consumption Day comes not only from retailers themselves, but also from environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the climate strike movement, which repeatedly point out that excessive consumption causes major damage to the environment.
But the situation of the employees is also a source of criticism. "The sufferers of this corporate-sponsored consumption frenzy are the employees who have to pack, transport and deliver the ordered products under enormous time pressure," writes the Unia trade union in a statement on the situation in logistics.
"Dumping prices give the impression that a product costs very little. But the costs are incurred in another place or at another time," adds Iwan Schauwecker, spokesman for Solidar Suisse, in response to an inquiry from the AWP news agency. Especially employees with rock-bottom wages in Asian factories or in our logistics centers would suffer.
If you want to buy a product, you should ask yourself whether you really need it and whether it will still be useful after a few months, advises Schauwecker. And in order to make stores aware of sustainability as well, people should be critical: "When shopping, ask how a product is produced. Maybe the answer isn't satisfactory, but you're also sending a signal every time as a critical consumer."
Customers would like to be sustainable buyers
Many customers are not fans of the discount battle. According to a survey by the portal Blackfridaydeals.ch, just under half of the Swiss want to abolish the marketing event, which was imported from the U.S. five years ago (Werbewoche.ch reported).
Socially important topics such as global warming and overconsumption would push the day into the background, it is said. However, this is countered by the fact that in recent years, more people have shopped on Black Friday than on any other day of the year.
However, there is a scientific explanation for this: the intention-behavior gap. "People want to shop sustainably, but when it comes to their own wallets, they still opt for the cheaper offer," Marc Linzmajer, a researcher at the University of St. Gallen HSG, tells the AWP news agency. (SDA)
