Shop the sales, buy and/or give things that are needed. Pay cash and limit credit spending because credit card spending makes things cost 20% or more than what the price tag says they cost.
From Triple Pundit: http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/11/black-friday-buy-nothing-day/
By Jan Lee
November 23rd, 2012
Looking for an alternative? Explore the sharing economy
For many Americans, Black Friday is a special but important part of the holiday season. A time in which the warm, appreciative glow of a family Thanksgiving is replaced by insatiable deals at midnight store openings; when hot turkey sandwiches, hot coffee and cold pie are savored all the more for the comfort they provide during long shopping lines, brutal crowds and desperate searches for those key items on the Christmas list. It’s a time that comes but once a year for both the consumer and the store owner, who each know that a profitable Black Friday may determine the financial outcome of the rest of the holiday season.
But for a small but growing sector of the population, Black Friday represents a different vision of holiday symbolism: a time to buy nothing.
It’s a time for visiting friends, renewing ties and regaining one’s perspective. It’s a time symbolized by pot-luck dinners, reflective discussions about sustainable living and the beneficial prospects of investing in a sharing economy.
It’s for resisting – and in some cases rebelling – against the temptations of unnecessary consumerism, something that some Americans feel threaten the very concept of the holiday season and their way of life.
This advocacy, often referred to as the Buy Nothing Black Friday movement (BND), stretches to every corner of the country, and can be found in every economic strata of society, from the post-hippie and yippie neighborhoods of San Francisco to the comfortable neighborly streets of Flatbush New York; from the congested streets of the metropolis, to the farms of rural small-town America.
It is also recognized in more than 50 countries around the globe, including Canada, where it is said to have been created.
Vancouver BC comic artist, Ted Dave, is credited with thinking up the “holiday” in 1992 while working on a concept for the parody magazine Adbusters. The manifesto was simple: “A 24-hour moratorium on consumer spending, designed to remind the consumer and the retailer of the true power of buying public.”(Robin Laurence, The Georgia Straight Vol. 33, #1666, Nov. 25, 1999.)
Continue reading at: http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/11/black-friday-buy-nothing-day/
