United Kingdom[edit]
In the United Kingdom, the term "Black Friday" originated within the Police and NHS to refer to the Friday before Christmas. It is the day where those services activated contingency to deal with the anticipated extra pressures put on the emergency services inherent in the larger than normal volumes of people going out drinking on the final Friday before Christmas. Contingencies can include setting up mobile field hospitals near City Centre nightspots.[31] The term has then been adopted outside those services to refer to the evening and night of the Friday immediately before Christmas, and would now be considered a mainstream term and not simply as jargon of the emergency services.
Since the start of the 21st century there have been attempts by retailers with origins in the United States such as Amazon to introduce a retail "Black Friday" as it would be understood by Americans, into the United Kingdom.[32][33] In 2013 Asda (a subsidiary of the American firm Walmart) announced its "Walmart's Black Friday by ASDA" campaign promoting the American concept of a retail "Black Friday"in the UK. Some online and instore companies have adopted the American-style Black Friday sale day, although others appear sceptical, with one 2013 comment piece in the trade publication Retail Week labelling it "simply an Americanism, which doesn't translate very well."[34]
In 2014, more UK-based retailers adopted the Black Friday marketing scheme than ever. Among them were ao.com, very.co.uk, John Lewis and Argos, who all offered discounted prices to entice Christmas shoppers. During Black Friday sales in 2014, police forces were called to stores across Britain to deal with crowd control issues, assaults, threatening customers and traffic issues.[35] Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, stated: "The events of last night were totally predictable and I am disappointed that stores did not have sufficient security staff on duty."[36] In response to incidents at branches of Tesco, Greater Manchester Police's deputy chief constable Ian Hopkins said that shoppers had behaved in an "appalling" fashion and the lack of planning from retailers was "really disappointing": "They should have planned appropriately with appropriate levels of security to make sure people were safe. They have primary responsibility to keep people safe and they can’t rely on the police to turn up and bail them out and that’s what happened last night."[37]
Asda announced that it would not take part in the 2015 Black Friday.[38][39] In 2015, Black Friday was predicted to become the biggest day of shopping in Britain, with as much as £2bn spent in shops and online in 24 hours.[40][41] However, many large retailers have discontinued, downplayed or heavily modified the concept since 2014, sometimes citing disruption to Christmas trading patterns or bad publicity.[42][43]
By ; Wikipedia.com
No comments:
Post a Comment