Buy Nothing Day
There are too many economic calls to track this holiday season. We support the “We Ain’t Buying It’ movement, but we also encourage Buy Nothing Day, an economic protest older than the Patriot Act. The idea is simple: on Black Friday, buy nothing.
Why we do it:
Black Friday has stretched and mellowed, but once upon a time people went straight from Thanksgiving to queuing up at big-box stores hoping to nab a “door buster” — high-value goods at a loss-leader price (like a TV for $10.) The idea was you had to choose a store, and once there you might as well shop the rest of the sale. Employees often worked the Thanksgiving holiday to prepare, and at the peak an arms-race mentality existed among retailers (and sometimes consumers.)
The first Buy Nothing Day was organized in Canada in September 1992 “as a day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption.” By 1997 it had migrated to America and moved to Black Friday. At its heyday it featured online advertising by Adbusters as well as creative protests including “whirly-carts” where consumers pushed empty carts around the stores (similar to a digital cart jam today) and wearing zombie makeup to wander the mall.
