Buy Nothing day is 23 November ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù also known as Black Friday in the United States ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù and I plan on honouring it.
I’ll be sure to make all my purchases today or Saturday.
Buy Nothing Day
8 thoughts on “Buy Nothing Day”
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why are you honouring an American day? I can’t imagine anyone else in the United States honouring it as the day after Thanksgiving is THE biggest shopping day of the year. Most stores open at 4am! If I could find my birth certificate I would be down at Kohl’s to get myself a new Kitchen Aid that is selling for $129.00 compared to over 300.00 here.
Buy Nothing Day is not American. It’s not country-specific; although, it did start in Canada. It’s on the same day as Black Friday, but is not synonymous with it.
Actually, Black Friday is not the biggest shopping day of the year. Usually, that is the Saturday before Christmas.
From 1993–2001, Black Friday was the 5th to 10th busiest day. In 2002 and 2004, Black Friday ranked 2nd place. In 2003 and 2005, Black Friday reached 1st place.
Doesn’t buying everything you need on the day before and day after defeat the purpose of Buy Nothing Day? By making all your purchases before the date, you are stocking up on goods. You hibernate for that one day and then spend again on the next day.
I hardly see the value in a day with out spending – Perhaps I am missing the point that Buy Nothing Day supposed to prove? How does 1 day of not spending do anything to anyone’s bottom line (Since the demand is still there)
If a point is to be made, individual corporations have to be mass targeted….but I digress.
Ah, you picked up on my sarcasm, Claudio. Good job. That was the entire point of my post. :)
Buy Nothing Day is no different than gas boycott days.
I’m with Claudio. If we’re making up for it by spending the day before and after buying stuff, it doesn’t really matter if less is spent on one particular day. It accomplishes nothing IMHO. Like the gas boycotts. I had friends who were promoting the one day boycott, and the night before they gassed up their vehicle. How does that help anything?
I have no idea what the idea behind Buy Nothing Day is supposed to be either – I will have to google it. But if it’s to boycott manufacturers or something like that, the only way to accomplish that is to vow to spend less than you did the year before. Maybe I’m not understanding the point.
For the record, I posted before I saw your clarification. Glad you were being sarcastic!
I can’t remember where it was, I think maybe Mormon Mommy Wars, or The Whole Note, or another blog, but a woman wrote about buying nothing for a week or two. I tried it, but failed. I didn’t really need anything, either.
We could live for a good solid year and be clean and have good breath and have clean clothes and good food. Unless our house burns down, knock on wood.
Kim, you’re hilarious, but I still want to log my overly earnest support of no shopping on Thanksgiving Weekend.
As you know, we have Thanksgiving a month late here in the States. It kicks off a four- or five-day weekend. (My kids were off school Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, giving us five days.)
It’s my favorite holiday, perhaps because its very nature makes it difficult to commercialize. The traditional food of Thanksgiving is inexpensive relative to how people mostly eat these days. Traditionally, it is eaten at home, not a restaurant, and everyone helps prepare the food, guests bringing side dishes. Often, is the occasion of multigenerational gatherings (the long weekend helps with the travel it now takes to get an extended family together.) People also notice that others are hungry, it’s an important season for volunteering and donations to food pantries and shelters. And, the theme is the holiday is gratitude, usually interpreted for what you have, not for what you’re about to buy.
I used to work retail, and I was grateful for the Thanksgiving-weekend shoppers because they meant we were likely to make our monthly sales goals. But since I found work in other sectors, I have never shopped Thanksgiving weekend. It is utterly depressing to trample the peace and connection of the Thanksgiving weekend by spending the time shopping.
Buy Nothing day is different than one-day gas boycotts. Gas Stations don’t have ridiculous advertising to hype the purchase of gasoline. Gas stations don’t beg you to come in at 4 am so that you’ll make further impulse purchases of gasoline for the next six to twelve hours. One day’s boycott of gasoline makes no stand against the internal combustion engine culture. One day without shopping buys back my family weekend peace so we can play scrabble and hike and eat turkey sandwiches.