Apple snubs discounts, sprays Black Friday zombies with gift cards Apple has dropped its practice of offering discounts on the annual shopping sales day dubbed Black Friday that paralyses the US, and is instead giving a very limited set of gift cards to purchasers of the shiny systems it wants to shift. In the redundant tech line, Cupertino's online and retail stores will give you a $50 chit …
Happy to spend money on Apple products that I can eventually resell, rather than buying Windows and Android devices which I invariably had to give to computer recycling services for the tax write-off. Apple TCO is definitely lower, at least in my case.
When you have a popular product, there seems no reason to discount it.
Read that as: When your customer's blindly treat you as the second coming, and anxiously grab at anything you create out of blind obedience including waiting on line for days in all sorts of weather just to say that you have it "first", granting said brainwashed masses a reprieve in the terms of a discount is...insulting.
'We raep and pillage every day, why grant a lucky few asylum?"
Wait how is it that the email about the event made it to your in box at all? Should have been marked as spam and ignored regardless of what they were offering as, from my personal experience, is total propaganda anyway. The only people who read their shit are cultists anyway.
It's not Thanksgiving for everyone in America, especially those whose ancestors were almost wiped out by disease and militia action so who knows, maybe he has native roots.
Should us Brits celebrate 'Subjugation of the Indian sub-continent day'?
Back to the story, anyone who offers store credit as a sale discount is an arse.
Please stop pushing white guilt.
"Thanksgiving" has nothing to do with "subjugation of anything". It commemorates the amazing finding that settlers in a command and control "equal sharing" economy nearly croak because everyone is waiting for everyone else to do the work, while giving the settlers the permission to actually sell what they produce puts corn on the table (The stuck-up radicals of Plymouth colony managed to go "somewhat free market" while Jamestown didn't get the message and continued to wallow in destitution and Chavez-style decrepitude).
It also used to be a celebration followed at the discretion of the various states until Lincoln decided to make it another matter of Big State to enliven the civil war wreckage with a bit of Joyful Führermessage.
Thanksgiving has none of its original connotations in our post-agrarian, post-religious country*.
The holiday is nothing more than a traditional harvest festival, we just invited some Indians from friendly tribes, who were also our preferred trade partners, to celebrate with us and sample the goods that will shortly be available for purchase from your nearest White Man.
It was also the time when the Christian settlers, who were stuck in a wilderness land less developed than South America at the time, did a whole lot of praying that they'd get through the winter without having to eat their children. In the earlier years there was a genuine desire to 'share Jesus' with the friendly savages. At that point Jesus wasn't being used as an excuse to deal with inconvenient things like other people who had something you wanted.
But just ignore the Indian part, that's too big and complicated and as far as the holiday goes they're irrelevant. Time passed and beginning in the early 20th century the holiday was largely the same as it had been in the 18th century: Harvest food and Jesus. After WWII however Thanksgiving began morphing into the celebration of intra-clan struggles for dominance and conveniently packaged traditional foods.
The end of the war brought mobility to families as well as the beginning of our permanent separation from the production of our food. As travel to Grandma's house for the holidays grew more common people began to do more shopping there because the different stores offered a different selection of holiday gifts plus Grandma was there and could kick in some extra money to get little Timmy a really great gift. Over time this became tradition even though we no longer needed to make a road trip to get good gifts. Everybody went shopping the day after the feast.
The Indian narrative was rolled into the core of the story in the 50's as children were already disconnected from the harvest and cultural phenomenon made cowboys and Indians popular subjects. You couldn't get the kids attention with lessons on colonial food hybridization techniques to increase yields in new soils and climates. Seeing as how we still didn't teach kids about what we did to Indians they just became a selling point for a history lesson.
Therefore, you can go shopping on 'Black Friday' with a clear conscience, knowing the holiday has always been driven by commercial interests. You are celebrating plentiful food for the winter and the opportunities for commercial gain just like the original settlers. Going into a store and buying something at Thanksgiving is historically correct. Only the products for sale have changed and Jesus isn't so big a part of it anymore. So if you thank a farmer for your food you've covered all the historical bases and can continue your month of commercial celebration with a glad heart.
Sales are good for a lot of things, especially ditching inventory during the last seasonal purchasing period before all the shiny new kit is unveiled in January. Retail thingamajig sales tank in February partly because people are willing to wait a little bit for the new stuff they've seen in the press.
If you're outside the normal industry product release schedule (like Apple) and you don't have insanely high levels of inventory rotting in the warehouse there's little point in having a big sale.
Sales aren't an altruistic offering by the manufacturer/retailer you know. They've got to get something out of the deal and the bargain hunter doesn't make for a good customer. There's no advantage to selling them a popular product at a cut rate price because you'll never see them again. If they take excess inventory it's a win-win for everybody, but it doesn't work that way with top-shelf product that already has velocity.
I personally can't stand Black Friday. People let the crazy hang out on that day. Every year it seems someone gets trampled to death* by the crowds and fistfights over merchandise are common enough that no one's really surprised when they hear about it. If only the big boxes would follow Apple's example maybe we could get a dose of sanity into the biggest shopping day of the year. After all, who's going to get into a fist fight or trample some kid to death for a $25 gift card?
*For the first time in a long time I haven't heard of anyone being trampled to death in the weekend news, but I spent the weekend basically offline. I haven't really gotten any news about much of anything since Wednesday until this morning.
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