Black Friday is a relatively new concept for South Africans, but it has rapidly gained traction, with retailers recording a spike of 200% in sales on this day over the past three years.Black Friday started in the US. It takes place the day after Thanksgiving to mark the start of the festive shopping season.It usually involves mayhem as consumers globally flock to shopping centres to take advantage of savings offered by brands that are all competing against each other to offer the best deals.Adele Coelho, global intelligence provider Meltwater’s head of marketing for India, the Middle East and Africa, reports that discussions on social media platforms across SA contained more than 42,000 references to Black Friday this year.She notes that not all of these references were positive. In fact, a quarter of all social media engagements on the day had negative connotations, particularly with regard to the excessive queues consumers faced, as well as traffic and crowds, which reached epic p...
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