Black Friday…
Why do we copy (everything) from the Americans?

Why do we keep copying the Americans (or the Anglo-Saxons more broadly) — in everything?
Black Friday, Halloween… what else?

Take Halloween, for instance. It’s celebrated mainly (and historically) in the English-speaking world — Ireland, England, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. When other countries adopt it, it’s purely because of American cultural influence — the famous soft power.

But then, why Black Friday? It’s not a holiday. And Hollywood didn’t “export” it through movies or culture. What was the intellectual chain of events that led the French, the Russians, and so many others to adopt this purely commercial phenomenon — often without even translating the name?

The story behind this “Black Friday” in the U.S. is simple: it’s the day after Thanksgiving, when Americans rush en masse into stores since it’s a public holiday. Merchants have been taking advantage of that since the 1950s — boosting sales on that very day. And because the stores were black with people, the day became known as “Black Friday.” So far, so good.

But in France, Russia, and elsewhere — you can’t really copy Thanksgiving. That would be… a bit much. And what got copied instead was the folklore. In Russia (2013) and France (2014), large retailers launched this commercial orgy. For the former, the main goal was to sell more and more (a practice politely called “stock clearance”). For the latter — to pay less, at all costs. Because Mr and Mrs Nobody are willing to do anything to grab yet another thing — for cheaper.

And little by little, everyone went crazy for this American “celebration” — one month before Christmas. And there again: the religious holiday of the year has become the most commercialized one in the entire Western world (for once, something that’s not purely American or Anglo-Saxon…). In France alone, the Christmas season generates staggering sales figures.

And since, apparently, that wasn’t enough, we went ahead and copied Black Friday from the Americans just a month earlier.

So here’s the question I keep asking myself tirelessly: How many more American holidays or practices are we going to copy? And conversely, how many foreign traditions — or commercial events — do Americans actually copy from others?

For French speakers, here’s a podcast on the same topic about France: