What We Do on Black Friday

Black Friday now lasts most of November, which is quite an achievement for a day. The British consumer group Which? calls it “a hype-driven sales extravaganza lasting for two weeks, or even longer at some retailers”, and some people have simply started calling it Black November.

In 2021 we published a post called Black Friday: why do we say no? Last November, we ran a Black Friday offer. Before anyone points that out in the comments, here is the honest version of where we stand, and why we think the day can be done differently.

A short story, only slightly exaggerated

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah spent his late teens and early twenties working in retail. “I worked several Black Fridays,” he told Interview magazine. “I literally saw one woman stepping on another woman for a pair of jeans.”

Out of that came Friday Black, the title story of his 2018 collection, which an NPR review summed up as “a zombie-apocalypse version of Black Friday”. Its central character is a young man selling fleece jackets at the mall, hoping to win a prize at work — a coat he wants to give his mother — while the shoppers storm the doors, trample one another and, when someone does not get up again, shove the body out of the way.

Adjei-Brenyah has described writing satire as a way of “putting humor against the edge of the terrible”. The real Black Friday has fewer zombies. It has countdown clocks instead, banners announcing that only two are left, and crossed-out prices the product was rarely, if ever, sold at. That is less frightening, but not by as much as you would hope.

The deal is rarely the deal

Which? tracks Black Friday prices for a full year around the sales. In its latest study, published in November 2025, 83% of the products on offer were the same price or cheaper at least once outside the sales period. On Black Friday itself, not one of the deals was at its lowest price of the year.

Other European checks point the same way. After last year’s sales, the Spanish consumer organisation OCU looked at almost 2,500 products on 61 online platforms and found that 89% of the crossed-out or reference prices did not comply with the rules. In Portugal, DECO PROteste found shops still getting round the law on promotions, with some products cheaper in the days before the campaigns began.

And when consumer authorities from 23 EU countries, plus Iceland and Norway, checked 314 online shops during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, 30% had referenced their discounts incorrectly and 18% had used pressure-selling techniques.

The law has been trying to keep up. Since 2022, any price reduction announced in the EU has had to be measured against the lowest price the shop charged in the previous 30 days. That such a rule needed writing at all tells you most of what you need to know about how discounts had been behaving.

Where the extra pairs go

A day built on selling more than people need has to start by making more than people need. The European Environment Agency estimates that 4–9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before they are ever used: between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes a year. Even the lower figure is enormous.

Online returns add to the pile. By the agency’s estimate, between 22% and 43% of clothing bought online and sent back — on average, one third — ends up destroyed. Picture it: one returned garment in three, with all the material, work, time and energy that went into it, turned into smoke or landfill. The agency’s own explanation is the bleakest part: in the textile industry, overproduction and destruction are ‘deemed acceptable’ and even make ‘economic sense’.

Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, large companies have been banned since 19 July 2026 from destroying unsold clothes, clothing accessories and footwear; medium-sized companies follow in 2030. Keeping brand-new shoes out of the incinerator seems an odd thing to need a law for. And yet here we are.

We are not the first to say no

People have been pushing back against the day for decades, and some of the best ideas have come from shops themselves. Here are a few milestones:

In 1992 the Canadian artist Ted Dave started Buy Nothing Day, later popularised by Adbusters magazine and now held on the same day as Black Friday. In 2011 Patagonia ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Black Friday headed “Don’t buy this jacket”, and in 2016 it gave all of its Black Friday sales — $10 million — to grassroots environmental organisations.

GivingTuesday, launched in New York in 2012, and Fair Saturday, first held in Bilbao in 2014, have claimed two of the days that follow Black Friday: one for giving, the other for cultural events that each support a social cause.

In France, the Green Friday collective has existed since 2017, started by Envie, a network of social enterprises. Member businesses commit to offering no discounts on Black Friday and giving 10% of that day’s turnover to associations; by 2023 the collective had brought together more than 500 businesses and associations. And Freitag, the Swiss bag maker, has run its own swapping platform, S.W.A.P., since 2019, and in recent years has closed all its checkouts, online and in its shops, on Black Friday.

Green Friday, and how to spot a fake one

Green Friday has caught on, and like most things that catch on, it has been borrowed. In 2022 the New Statesman called Cathay Pacific “a prime offender” for its Green Friday offer to offset double the usual carbon emissions for each ticket sold: a flight promotion, in other words, with a green ribbon on it. A year later the electronics retailer Currys launched a Green Friday of its own, with the stated aim “to unite sustainability with immense deals”.

So here is the test we apply to ourselves. Green Friday only means something if it can be described without using the word green: what is not on sale, what is given away, what is repaired or resold, and how much. If a brand cannot tell you that, it is Black Friday in a different colour.

What we do instead

We are a small shoe company, and we are not going to pretend that November does not matter to us. What we can do is be specific.

• One offer, stated plainly. Last year it was 20% for everyone and up to 25% for members, and this year it will be the same. As we said at the time, we prefer modest, honest discounts that respect our work and the work of those who work with us. It is a real discount, and we offer it so as not to be wiped out in a month when everyone else is on sale, but it is not the biggest discount we offer during the year, as regular customers will know.
• A second life for the pairs you no longer wear. Through our Pre-Loved Program, you can send back NAE shoes you no longer wear and receive a €25 voucher as a thank-you. We clean and repair what can be repaired. Pairs in excellent condition go back on sale at a reduced price, with half of the net proceeds going to local NGOs, and pairs that are good to wear but not right for resale are donated to them.
• Samples and seconds, given away. By last November we had donated 230 pairs of shoes to REMAR, which supports people in need. Many were samples or pairs with small defects: exactly the kind of stock that, elsewhere, ends up in the figures above.
• Rosa, and the people who rescued her. Since 2025 we have sponsored Rosa, a pig rescued by Animal Save & Care Portugal who now lives safely at a sanctuary, and a percentage of our sales goes to the organisation.
• Making what you own last. The cheapest pair of shoes is still the one you already own, which is why our care guide exists.

If you do buy something on the 27th

We are not going to tell you not to. But a few things are worth doing first:

• Check the 30-day price. In the EU, a shop announcing a reduction has to show the lowest price it charged in the previous 30 days. If that price is missing, be suspicious; if it is barely higher than today’s, the deal is mostly decoration (and that is the polite word for it).
• Sleep on it. In a 2023 survey of 3,605 UK adults for Starling Bank, 29% of people who had shopped over Black Friday said they had regretted their purchases. A night’s sleep costs nothing, and the countdown clock will, somehow, still be there tomorrow.
• Ask yourself three questions. They are the ones we suggested back in 2021: do I want it, or do I need it? Can I think of countless occasions to wear it? Is it versatile enough to survive more than a few seasons?
• Look second-hand first, ours included. Our Pre-Loved collection is a good place to start.

Whatever you end up doing on 27 November, we hope nobody steps on you for a pair of jeans. And if you have your own way of doing Black Friday differently, tell us in the comments or on our social media.