According to early reports, Yesterday's Black Friday broke all sales figures records, up 14.5% on last year. A festival that started in the USA, coming as it does the day after Thanksgiving, it is now consuming Europe. And that is indeed the nature of the beast: consumption. It is perhaps the first festival that was founded on the religion of consumerism. Such a quasi-religious festival had to have been born in the Anglosphere, where capitalism is bound to the Reformation and the ensuing Puritan tradition that gave birth to economic and social liberalism. Was it not that theologian beloved of the American descendants of Scotsmen and Northern Englishmen, John Calvin who said, 'Greed is good, greed works'? Something like that anyway. I'm glad we got shut of them after the Restoration. Anyway, Black Friday is now being exported. Even in the usually anti-capitalist France, Black Friday has been promoted relentlessly this year. The French term for this is 'vendredi fou', although it tends to be kept in English in line with the European Union's attempt to reduce all European languages to dialects of English, although the Wikipedia site claims this is translated as 'vendredi noir', showing again how that site is written by spergy but dim sixth formers.
