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COLLETT CONTROVERSIAL


Black Friday? Are you even allowed to say that these days?


Angler, shooter, industry stalwart, fashion guru and general controversialist, Steve Collett, vents his spleen... this month it’s all about some American sale day.


O


nion ketchup, Fanny packs, cars that only drive in straight lines that do two to the gallon, and Cool Whip, I haven’t seen anyone rush headlong into these American cultures, have you? The date isn’t the wrong way round in the UK, and I still hear men going out for a “fag” - something that may get you a black eye in parts of the US of A!


So why the feck have we imported and embraced this daft thing they call Black Friday. After all, if an Englishman would have invented it, he would have been deemed racist immediately by some sandal wearing short haired lentil eater declaring that black people should be allowed every day! As soon as I heard about it a few years ago I actually face palmed myself that hard, I gave myself a fat lip. I remember seeing a quote from a leading fashion retailer saying “it’s bad for customers, it’s bad for business and its bad for UK retail.” Guess what… he was right.


1 Steve Collett 46 | Tackle & Guns | Dec / Jan 18 1


Like any tackle retailer in the UK I have become a sheep, and followed the Black Friday masses, discounting heavily, spending a fortune in advertising, and for what? Ok, we did a few quid, but pro quo, did we really? Looking hard and analysing November’s fi gures I could see a trend, a trend that involved customers spending next to nothing


during the weeks before Black Friday as I enticed them with advertising. In actual fact, like most shops, I could probably have shut the doors for the fi rst three weeks of November as every customer knew they’d save a fortune if they waited till the end of the month. Has the penny dropped?


Who came up with this? Maybe it was Google, because my spend went up as I targeted spenders, and advertised my wares for a huge discount, cutting margin. Did Google have a Black Friday advertising discount, did they f&ck! Did Facebook? Of course it didn’t! I don’t even know the tradition behind it really, and I have to tell you, I couldn’t even be arsed to google it, or research it. Apparently some turkey got shot in the face, the family came round and ate it, had a row, and the shops were shut, something like that. In essence what we have done in the UK is create false promotions, fake prices and simply shifted sales from December to November. Those retail industry “experts”


say it’s good for business, and it will boost a consumer culture, but have a guess what… I did research one of these “retail industry experts” called Tarquinius the Seventh, who’s grandfather owned Sussex, and discovered that he has never sold a carrot in his life. He’s a Cambridge


www.tandgmagazine.com


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