Celebrate Your Own Culturally Relevant Holidays, Not Borrowed Ones from a Different Cultural Context

Thanksgiving is a time for family get-togethers in the US. Distant relatives come for a dinner party, with turkey or otherwise, under one roof, perhaps for just this once in a whole year. But eating and talking are not the only activities when family members get together. When people get together so rarely, some gift-giving is bound to be necessary, so retailers see the Thanksgiving weekend to be a great time for pushing more products out the door. The result is a Black Friday tradition of jaw-dropping discounts and binge-buying for the whole family.

In this American cultural context, the idea of Black Friday being the biggest shopping day of the year makes total sense. But the same cannot be said for other countries without any Thanksgiving tradition. If your Black Friday is just another Friday, then it seems rather odd to attempt to turn it into a day for shopping for no particular reason. Whereas Christmas can be commercialized through the idea of romance and Halloween the camaraderie of dressing up, Thanksgiving (and as such, Black Friday) only works when people get together. 

Yet, for every culture, there are already traditional holidays when extended family members do get together, so to get them to get together for another one is difficult. For instance, in the Chinese-speaking world, work schedules revolve around the need to travel to hometowns for Chinese New Year's. Because that holiday already exists to allow people to meet up, there is simply no way employers can give people more days off for another one during Thanksgiving (or any other time of the year). The long-established yearly calendar precludes Thanksgiving from being taken on by foreign cultures as a "family" holiday.

Without that family-centric nature of Thanksgiving, it is difficult to see how Black Friday can be advertised as little more than another chance to give out discounts. In a world where retailers are constantly finding more reasons to give discounts anyways, retailers outside America need to think hard for Black Friday to be more meaningful than the other days for discounts. Especially since people know little about what Black Friday is anyways, it is hard to see how the hurdle of having to educate people on it can quickly become a stampede of enthusiastic shoppers.

Such realities of Black Friday being a culturally distant concept makes it all the more head-scratching to see big Japanese retailers trying to jump on the bandwagon of doing discounts on this particular day. When putting out the discounted goods for sale, the only advertisements are the color black, and the words "Black Friday," making it difficult for shoppers to conjure up exactly what is the image the retailers are trying to evoke. At least for Christmas, wintery scenes with many snowmen, not to mention countless songs and movies, help people resonate with the warmness of the family. 

Blindly attempting to commercialize Black Friday without creating any sort of cultural context may be a difficult sell for even the most trigger-happy shoppers. And it is particularly so in Japan, where stagnant wages have led to shoppers being more discerning about the rationale behind every major purchase. Purchases for New Year's and Christmas respectively many family members and lovers happy. But who is happy when buying for Black Friday? Unless the prices are exceedingly lower than those available at other times of the year, it is hard to justify shopping on this particular day.

While it is undoubtedly understandable that retailers are finding every potential opportunity to get people to part with their money, they should seek inspiration closer to home, rather than blindly importing retail cultures that few locals can relate to. Tapping into local sentiments for retail therapy, much as Singles' Day has done in China, is a much better and safer bet than attempting to teach people about a completely foreign one like Black Friday, without any guarantee of success. The decision to invest in Black Friday decor shows a lack of imagination on the part of Japanese retailers.

Just as holidays are cultural, shopping, and personal consumption of all forms, is cultural. A successful day of shopping conforms to certain cultural needs, triggers certain cultural cues, and satiates certain cultural needs. That is why traditional holidays remains strong for centuries and consumption cycles around them are self-reinforcing year after year. That explains the success of Black Friday in America. But when taken out of the original cultural context, and without a different cultural context created to anchor it, a successful shopping day in one place quickly loses relevance in another place.