Black Friday: bargains and protests

Black Friday’s a popular day for shopping. There are sales in shops and online. This year, shoppers spent $40 billion.

Black Friday started in the USA. The holiday shopping period starts on Black Friday. New York’s shops were busy again after the pandemic.

This year, prices went up a lot. People are spending extra money on Black Friday. They want some good deals. In New York, there were many shoppers.

Christmas is making people spend, says Antonia Harris.

Antonia Harris: "With the holiday coming up, Christmas, the people are willing to spend ahead of themselves a little bit, to make sure they're having festivities. And in there, a sea of people coming in the door, oh my goodness, it doesn't look like anything slowed down, not even a little."

Shoppers often travel to New York for Black Friday. They’re buying a lot this year.

Samy Kunz: "I think it made us look for sales more so than we usually would, just to be conservative with how much we're spending."

Chase Moore: "Definitely more than usual!"

Chase Moore: "I have already spent way more that's in my budget. In grad school currently, so budget is like negative 300. So, we're, where, we've, we've already crossed that just by being in New York City."

Cheap products are often bad for the environment. Things break quickly and people throw them away.

Greenpeace wants companies to change. Celia Ojeda Martinez works for Greenpeace.

Celia Ojeda Martinez: "What Greenpeace is denouncing here today is not so much the consumers, who also have a role to play, but the big brands and big companies that continue to produce products that are less and less durable, of lower quality, with toxic products that end up polluting because they end up incinerated and in landfills."

Black Friday’s a problem for Greenpeace. Companies want people to buy more. But this isn’t good for the environment.

Celia Ojeda Martinez: "Black Friday is about how brands encourage us to buy one more pair of jeans when we already have six exactly the same in our wardrobe. To produce one pair of jeans, it takes 7,500 liters of water, which is the same amount of water a person drinks and consumes for seven years."

In the past, Black Friday was one day. Now, there's Cyber Monday and December sales too. View Less