The Guardian view on Black Friday: a triumph of imagination | Editorial

On Thursday, nothing out of the ordinary will happen in Britain. Millions of people will get up and go to work as normal; families will remain widely dispersed; shops will be open as usual; and at the end of the day the nation will gather for its traditional meals of takeaway and microwaved convenience foods eaten in front of a screen. In the US, by contrast, it will be the feast of Thanksgiving, when the whole country shuts down and families gather from across vast distances for a ritual meal celebrating America’s founding myth. An anthropologist might well suppose that this was the most important festival of the year, far more so than Christmas. No one would dare declare a war on Thanksgiving. So it makes a kind of sense that the day after be given over to the frenzy of shopping.

It makes no sense at all for Black Friday to be transplanted to Britain. There is nothing at all special about the day in the British social calendar. Even in the retail calendar it falls squarely in the middle of the runup to Christmas, which nowadays starts some time in early October, so that there are already angels watching over the crowds in Oxford Street in central London, while in Bradford the Christmas decorations went up even earlier.

It’s obvious why the retail sector is keen. The things that are bought specially at this time of year are almost by definition things that people don’t need. They are merely passing through on their journey from factory to landfill. Yet the whole modern economy is built around the notion of shopping as a pleasure in itself. Without a thriving market for frivolities, fewer people could afford necessities. It might seem shocking to have such a festival of consumerism in a country where so many are dependent on food banks, but things would be even worse without it. With that said, two things about this week’s sales stand out. The first is that they will do very little to benefit high street retailers. That may be even more true in the US, where shares in bricks-and-mortar shops are being sold short in anticipation that this will turn out to be another triumph for Amazon. But even here, the kinds of shops and small businesses that tend to build up communities are unlikely to benefit from the steadily increasing shift to online shopping.

The one thing physically located retailers can offer that can’t so easily be reproduced online is, paradoxically, the one thing people are increasingly willing to pay for, if they are shopping recreationally: an experience rather than a physical object. One of the most profitable companies in the world today, Apple, has made its fortune by tying the experience and the widget so closely together that its phones and computers work on the imagination like sacred objects, offering an experience to their owners that is quite distinct from their performance. This also explains why Apple stores are among the most profitable retail outlets in the world, and the least affected by the online world. The act of shopping becomes its own reward.

Meanwhile, in China, the Singles Day sales have been boosted as an equivalent to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, but they are entirely online. The idea is to turn shopping into a collective online experience, like a game, where the imagination is freed from the dreary inconveniences of physical shops. In the last analysis, materialism is not really about material objects at all.