Rejecting Black Friday

Black Friday is a cultural phenomenon. Businesses look forward to getting into the "black" and customers are excited by the savings. I have fond childhood memories from Thanksgiving festivities at my grandmother's farm of family gathering around the table paging through different advertisements to plan the next day's shopping strategy. This was back in the 90's when Black Friday still had a certain mystique to it. Now it is impossible to imagine Grandma Helen fighting for a spot in a line snaking around the exterior of a big box store

Fast forward 30 years and we know the actual cost of rabid consumerism: overproduction, overconsumption, and environmental damage. Or, as Frontier Group states, "U.S. households throw out 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day than at any other time of the year. Much of that trash is packaging, but a surprising amount of the trash discarded consists of useful products. Every year, more than 5 billion pounds of waste is generated from returned products – both the return packaging, but also in many cases the products themselves. Between 30% and 40% of clothing sales are returned, but only 10% of all returns are restocked on shelves to be resold. The rest may be shipped off to the landfill or the incinerator." The Real Cost of Black Friday

I am sorry if you came to our website hoping for a Black Friday deal; we do not have one and never will. We want to promote our values of reuse and sustainability, which is why we developed our Green Friday promotion. By offering more store credit back to customers we hope they will participate in the Patches Project. Not only does this provide a built-in discount to our store, but it allows people on a budget who value handmade and organic to buy our clothing and have the same guarantee that we will take them back. 

If you do partake in the traditions of Black Friday, please be kind to the workers on the front lines; they are often underpaid and overworked. Try to support small, local business when possible.