You've probably been getting just as many mails and special offers about Black Friday as I do. Lots and lots of offers... for discounts.

Sometimes, these discounts are so high that I wonder how this can be possible. Either it means that the vendor is having a huge margin with the normal pricing, so there's still some profit left after the discount, or it means there's no profit anymore and it's more or less an advertisement stint, with the intention of getting the customers to buy other things as well (possibly believing that the prices have to be just as good in every case, which they cannot be, or else the shop won't survive).

Black Friday has become more and more of a thing in Germany in the past years, and I'm not really in love with the thing. At all. I can totally understand giving discounts on goods that have been sitting in your stock for ages, taking up space - you'd want to clear those out as a merchant. (As a customer, I totally enjoy those, by the way. If something delights me that happens to be from last season... well, I couldn't care less that it's not the current season's colour, or whatnot!)

I also get giving discounts for large amounts of the same thing (and yes, if you are planning to order a heckton of something from my shop, you can always send me a message first and ask about the price, and I'll see what I can do).

When it comes to random temporary deep discounts, though... I don't get it. When I calculate my prices, I try to go for a profit margin that makes sense for running my business, but is still fair to my customers. Sometimes, because the raw materials are expensive, or because there's a lot of costs involved in the making of the product, the things I offer do end up with a relatively high price tag - I can't help that, and it usually means that I can only have small amounts of these things made, and that there's a certain risk of me sitting on them for a long time. (Which means storage space, and capital tied up - also something that has to be considered when setting a price.) That said, my pricing policy does not leave a lot of room for price reductions. So that's one reason why I won't do something like "half off everything for Black Friday!".

As a consumer, I'm also somehow miffed when I buy something, then find out a little bit later that said thing is now offered for X percent off. Yes, I know that's just bad luck, and since the price I paid has obviously not killed me, I could just ignore it. However, it still leaves some kind of bad feeling for me - and it will mean that the next time I need to buy the thing again, and it's not urgent, I might wait until it's discounted again, or I might look for it somewhere else, now knowing that it could be available for a lower price. Maybe I'm the only one weird in that way... but I wouldn't want to cause this feeling in my own customers.

I'm also not really in love with the idea of trying to get people into a buying frenzy on a specific day, or weekend. Most of us in the western world - myself included - buy more things than we really need anyways. We're not living in a world of limitless supply, though, and getting new things all the time is not going to be sustainable forever. So having a day hyped up to make people buy, buy, buy... it doesn't seem like a really good thing to me.

What do you think? Is Black Friday a thing where you are? If so, do you enjoy it? Are you happy with the deep discounts for no apparent reason? Or would you prefer to have lower, stable prices all the time?