Black Friday

Last week, I was walking through San José on Wednesday afternoon, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I was walking down San José's central avenue, which is a pedestrian avenue for a ten-block stretch in the center of town. Walking with a guy I know from my town who had come in on the same bus and was headed the same way, I noticed that a number of the stores had advertisements up for 'viernes negro'-Black Friday-translated without any creativity. I was genuinely surprised.

I asked my friend about it, he seemed to not be fazed. He saw it as a good opportunity for the stores to advertise and celebrate a foreign holiday. I found that to be about as positive an interpretation of the phenomenon as possible, and he's a pretty positive guy. I tried to explain two things to him: one, that Black Friday is only special because it's the day after Thanksgiving, and two, that in the US most people (should be all) don't put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving, so Black Friday serves as an unofficial (or heck, official) beginning of the Christmas season. He understood and agreed that it was kind of odd that Costa Rica (and I imagine many other countries) celebrate Black Friday on it's own.

My initial reaction was, how ludicrous (and sad) it is to have Black Friday but no Thanksgiving. I'm sure some people that are better consumers than me are more into Black Friday, but I'd say it is the worst holiday we could export or have imported. Yet, on a more productive note, this conversation got me thinking about how culture is shared. Giant shopping days aren't uniquely American, yet Black Friday is. America's influence on Costa Rica is pretty significant, due to proximity, tourism, and politics (and in a small part The Peace Corps). Yet, why is it that Black Friday is the American holiday with a presence on San José's main street. Did American corporations bring it down here to increase sales? (Granted-it was the Costa Rican vendors that had the most prominent displays.) Did Costa Rican businesspeople working in both the US and Costa Rica implement it to grow sales? There are certainly more possibilities, and perhaps the real answer will surprise me. I wish that having lived abroad a few places would allow me to answer this question, but it hasn't. It is one of the more interesting things about living abroad-seeing which parts of foreign cultures (especially my own) have been adapted and which haven't. Like, why is Slayer so popular in Costa Rica? I don't know why, but it's fun and challenging to think about.