In recent years, Black Friday has become a controversial post-Thanksgiving tradition. While the Seattle Times traces the origins of the name to shopkeepers getting “back in the black” financially speaking, the busiest shopping day of the year has been taken to an extreme. Violence, greed, and even death have become part of the Black Friday culture.
In addition, Black Friday kicks off the most wasteful time of the year. The EPA reports that between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, families increase their household waste by 25% and add an extra million tons of waste per week to landfills. Gift wrap and shopping bags add four million tons of waste annually, much of which is produced and discarded in the coming months.
Some, like Salon‘s Andrew Leonard, believe that the culture surrounding Black Friday exacerbates this wastefulness and materialism. “There’s a point where healthy consumerism becomes out-of-control marketing-driven commodity fetishism,” Leonard wrote last year. “There is a point in our culture beyond which camp and kitsch no longer make the least ironic sense, where consumerism loses its last mooring to civilization…that point is Black Friday.”
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