Bags full of clothes and fighting over a discounted television: Black Friday has been embraced in the Netherlands over the past decade. But now that boosting (over)consumption is at odds with sustainability goals, some retail chains are opting for a dissenting voice. Nice initiative or just for the stage?
Green Friday, Bring Back Friday or For Future Friday. At retail chains such as Dille & Kamille, Ikea and Bever, Friday 25 November is anything but a shopping spree. Instead of bins full of discounted items, customers will find closed doors next week, a trade-in point for old furniture or free shoe repair.
The initiatives want to counter Black Friday, the shopping festival around Thanksgiving in the United States that spread to the Netherlands about seven years ago. Although American scenes – with hordes of consumers fighting over the last cheap game consoles – were largely omitted here, the discount parade brings many extra shoppers every year. In the physical stores alone, a debit card turnover of 529 million euros was achieved last year, 20 percent more than on a regular Friday.
Anything but logical
Enough reason for entrepreneurs to throw in plenty of discounts again this year. With the high inflation and declining purchasing power, they can make good use of the extra income after the corona crisis. Still, Black Friday is a thorn in the side of many. After all, as world leaders thousands of miles away tackle climate change with varying degrees of success, encouraging people to buy even more stuff doesn’t make sense.
That is exactly why we came up with Green Friday four years ago, says Hans Geels, director of retail chain Dille & Kamille. Together with the Trees for All foundation, the company decided to plant trees to compensate for the shopping frenzy on Black Friday. Other companies could join in. That sounds nice, but if companies nevertheless continue to sell goods for dump prices, how credible are those green intentions?
That is why Trees for All decided to tighten up the requirements for participation in Green Friday this year: participants are no longer allowed to give discounts at all on 25 November. As a result, there have been more than a hundred fewer registrations so far. Joly Bogers of Trees for All blames the harsh economic conditions in which many companies now find themselves. “In times of inflation and an energy crisis, it’s harder for them to ignore Black Friday.”
“Greenwashing?”
Yet there are also companies that are still trying to give a sustainable twist to Black Friday. For example, consumers can trade in their old products at sports shop Decathlon from Black Friday, children’s shops in South Holland will collect toys for families who are less well off and Dille & Kamille will close all branches on 25 November. ‘We want to make customers think, even if it hurts us financially,’ says Geels.
Great initiatives, thinks Pablo Druijts. As the founder of the website Black Friday Netherlands, he may earn his living with the discount promotions around Black Friday, ‘but I’m not in favor of buying things you don’t actually need’. He hopes that consumers will mainly use the discount period for essential purchases, ‘such as a new telephone subscription’. Druijts has noticed since last year the offer on his website that companies are increasingly turning away from Black Friday. ‘Although it is mainly companies that were already working on a sustainable image that are now dropping out.’
Partly because of this, Druijts questions the ‘green’ campaigns. ‘Is it really about sustainability or is it greenwashing?’ That distrust also lives at Extinction Rebellion. ‘Companies are now coming up with this initiative, because people find sustainability increasingly important. But companies like Decathlon also sell 5 euro bags,’ says Robin Bruisje. Nevertheless, Bruisje sees the action as a step in the right direction. ‘After all, such a company cannot dissolve itself in one day.’
Consume more/less
Although there are indeed plenty of companies that try to polish up their green image with marketing campaigns, professor of financial management Gerard Mertens gives the Green Friday initiative the benefit of the doubt. ‘If companies invest money in sustainability that they would otherwise have used to generate even more turnover, then we should applaud that.’
But whatever color companies give next Friday, the shopping frenzy around the holidays doesn’t seem to suffer much for the time being. Research by Motivaction among more than a thousand consumers shows that more than a quarter went on a bargain hunt on November 25, slightly more than last year. At the top of the wish list are the products of Bol.com, Amazon and the Mediamarkt, three companies that are stretching the concept of ‘Friday’ considerably with their weeks of discount campaigns.
To his own surprise, Pablo Druijts has also seen the number of visitors to his Black Friday website rise again in recent weeks. ‘When I started the site in 2015, there was already criticism of Black Friday. But the gap between what consumers say and what they do still exists.’
And so consumers and companies are like the chicken and the egg. ‘As long as we keep buying, companies will continue to produce rubbish and give discounts,’ says Mertens. Bruce agrees wholeheartedly. ‘You can also choose to give away something that you already have at home during the holidays. Because let’s face it: we all have enough stuff anyway.’