Thanksgiving is the last big family holiday in the United States before Christmas. Its roots are controversial, but over time, its purpose has evolved, giving rise to different celebrations. It is almost like a milestone in the year, marking the beginning of the countdown to Christmas. Internationally, Thanksgiving marks a different milestone: the Black Friday sales. Taking inspiration from American big shopping centers, and even small businesses, now all big stores across the globe have their take on Black Friday.

In recent years, the Friday after Thanksgiving, which was dedicated to Christmas present shopping, has been blown out of proportion. It is no longer a singular day of massive sales on most goods, even the latest editions to the store’s catalogs. It has rather become a Black Weekend, or Black Cyber Week for online stores, or Black Month of Old Collections, you name it. The “event” can extend as far as the beginning of November. Over the years, there have been debates about the actual scale of these sales. Some argue that sellers intentionally inflate prices in the weeks leading up to Black Friday only to then bring them back down to their original estimates. More interesting than the seller psychology, though, is the buyer psychology.

Hoarding is an important survival mechanism, which kicks in especially when the weather gets colder in preparation for a winter of food scarcity. It is only logical that some of that instinct, as with other species, has been preserved in humans, and not only that: it has now been identified as a psychological condition. In addition to hoarding, we are all prone to taking the easy way out. In terms of buyer psychology, it is all about saving time and saving money. Combine our hoarding instincts with a low price, and you get the recipe for a good Black Friday. Tending to our sometimes subconscious instincts is one way for sellers to get us to buy things that we might not need and this is exactly what happens during Black Friday sales.

It is both a welcomed and dreaded event among shop owners because Black Fridays across the globe have created quite the craze for shopping and good deals. Perhaps trying to minimize the influx of customers is also the reason why the day of sales has become a week or even a month of lower prices. But the effect remains: people run to stores to buy all the goods they want at a discounted price. Some even get a buzz out of the competitive element of shopping on sale, since it is very much a “first come, first serve” deal. Still, are they really saving much?

Even without entertaining the theory about pre-inflated prices, it is not difficult to conclude that Black Friday is the time when people tend to spend the most money on unnecessary items. The overabundance of products and the lower prices would drive most people to simply buy more things. At the end of the day, it might even turn out that if you had done your Christmas shopping on a regular day, you might have made more reasonable purchases and gotten everything you need for much less money just because you would be more conscious about the spending.

It is an unfortunate consequence of capitalist thinking that we expect a more expensive gift to be a more appreciated gift. That is, however, not the case. The appreciation of gifts is all about presentation, studies find. Our perception of a gift’s value is not so much its content as its wrapping and the overall process of giving. Yet Black Friday has long been marketed as the one day when you can get the most outrageously expensive products for a less frightening sum. This kind of thinking not only leads to overconsumption and overproduction but also to underappreciation of the work that goes into making the products. If we perceive that a product should be less valuable to begin with, then we choose to ignore all the people involved in creating it: from the blank sheet of paper, through the brainstorming and creation process, to the person who wraps it with a bow. It promotes the active exploitation of workers in various industries and the cutting of costs when it comes to environmental impact prevention.

The solution does not lie in buying from small businesses only as we have been led to believe. It is sometimes impossible to do so. Instead, we need to be reasonable about the amount of purchases we make, instead of the money we use for them. We must also reconsider the notion of shopping on sale as a socio-economic exploitative practice and instead opt to pay full price as an act of kindness and fairness. So next Black Friday, maybe both price-conscious and socio-environmentally responsible gifts would be even more appreciated by the recipients since you will definitely put more thought into the gift. c