Black Friday or “Black Shadow”? Watch out for false promotions in stores [PODCAST]

Black Friday is a shopping tradition that – how many other customs – has arrived to Poland from the USA. In this country, since the 1950s, the Friday following Thanksgiving is considered a “shopping holiday”. Many Americans take a day off at work that day, and stores hold numerous promotions and cut prices by 50, 60, and even 80 percent.

TechnoTerapia is a technological podcast of Gazeta.pl. In the new episode, Daniel Maikowski and Robert Kędzierski reflect on the meaning of Polish Black Friday. There was also a RetroTech series in which we remember the first wars of web browsers.

While Polish stores have fallen in love with Black Friday in recent years, they still do not play with us on the same terms as their American counterparts. Black Friday in our country is often still a “fake holiday”, not a “promotion holiday”.

Black Friday “in Polish”. Discounts or increases?

This is confirmed by the data collected by Deloitte company, which looked at the scale of price cuts and promotions during last year’s Black Friday. In 2020, the difference in the reduced prices of the analyzed product categories was, on average, only 3,5 proc.

At the same time, the average price increase was 3.42%, so we can say that in fact on Black Friday the value of the examined basket of products did not change (!). To put it brutally: Black Friday in our country is often still a “fake holiday”, not a “promotion holiday.”

– emphasize the authors of the report.

Therefore, the promotion on Black Friday (or Black Week – because the sales festival has already stretched for a whole week) should be approached with a distance and a lot of distrust. Especially since stores use various tricks to convince us that the promotion is something that is not.

How not to be fooled by bogus Black Friday promotions? How to protect yourself from shopping tricks?