Despite intense marketing, few consumers care about Black Friday
Today is Black Friday, a day on which many stores offer huge discounts. But despite a lot of marketing, Netherlands residents aren’t enthused by the mass shopping day from America.
Most (68 percent) don’t plan to buy a Black Friday deal. Only 26 percent say they want to grab a bargain, 22 percent of them because they’re short on cash, Hart van Nederland reports after surveying a representative 3,365 members of its opinion panel.
The main reason Netherlands residents don’t plan to participate in Black Friday is that they simply don’t need anything new (41 percent). A third (33 percent) don’t want to “go along with the madness.” One respondent said: “I hate all the commercial crap that comes over from America (Black Friday, Santa Claus, Halloween) and refuse to participate.”
Another third said they don’t trust the discounts the stores offer. Every year there are rumors that stores raise their prices in the run-up to Black Friday to make their deals look bigger. It is not entirely clear whether these rumors are true.
Last year, the Consumentenbond told Hart van Nederland that it has never been able to determine that shops cheat customers like this on a large scale. “We see it happen occasionally,” the consumers’ association said.
