Today is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving which is considered the official start of the holiday season. It is the biggest shopping day of the year as defined by customer traffic. The origin of the term itself has a number of interesting theories - click here for an article. In the United States, the Christmas season has become extremely commercial - it now accounts for 20% of the year's retail sales. For many merchants the season is a make or break time - yearly profits depend on a good season; a bad season can push a retailer into bankruptcy. Every year I see holiday decoration and marketing start earlier, in many cases quite a bit before Black Friday. I do like the festive atmosphere and the distraction from the day to day grind. It's just sad that a fundamentally religious holiday would become so enormously commercial ...Above, David Blaine assists Target in a publicity stunt by escaping in time for their Black Friday sale starting at 6am Friday. He was chained and suspended from a spinning gyroscope over Times Square. Above photo, AP/Seth Wenig - sorry folks, not my photo this time, but this AP photographer was able to capture the scene from above, and got a view of the city, while I was at my folks in CT doing the traditional holiday thing...
6 comments:
oo..i heard the news about David Blaine on TV. and great to see a photo here.
:)
and i saw the same phenomenon here: shopping time is begining...it seems that the Chinese in Shanghai not only have the western style shopping seasons, also the traditional shopping season during the Spring Festival.
mmm...i understand why so many businessmen come to China to open his company.
have a nice weekend.
jing
www.shanghaidailyphoto.com
I am having trouble seeing what the picture is as it's smaller than usual.
Jing, I've been in the import/export business for a while and the reason so many western companies come there is for the inexpensive labor costs. Things can be made there much more cheaply. It is more for production than for selling to the Chinese market. For example, America (I don't know about Western Europe but I imagine it is similar) imports more from there than we export to China. I have a lot of customers that find a Chinese partner (there are laws that reguire Chinese partnership in most cases) so that they can have manufacturing facilities in China. We import a lot from China.
I hope to visit someday.
Have a good weekend!
Urbane Couture is giving away punk t shirts I saw it on the urbane couture myspace page
this is on TV news here for two days...
You are forgiven only because you are with your folks. Don't do it again! jj
susan, thx for your nice comments for me.actually i know that big reason of why all people like to come to China and do their business.
I am just kidding....:))
I think people here are chaning a lot, the ideas, the custom and even some shopping habits.
sometimes our planet is really small and united. do you think so??
jing
have a nice weekend.
www.shanghaidailyphoto.com
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