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Comment by thecleaner | Hacker News Reader

Do people really care about Black Friday that much ? Also why 20countries ? Isnt Black Friday mainly an American thing ?

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Amazon made it an international thing. Since Amazon started the heavy promotion of their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in Germany, basically every German (online) store also offers Black Friday discounts. However, they discounts aren’t typically as big as they can be in the US, at least that is what I found from my comparison

In Poland most 'black friday' discounts are of the 1 item per shop or 30% off the price we raised by 40% a week ago kind.

So, perfectly keeping with the American tradition then.

Amazon now almost has Black Friday month, since I think the 8th they had "Early Black Friday" deals, since yesterday it’s "Black Friday Week", and after BF it will be "Cyber Monday Week".

Discounts aren't typically as big because manufacturer mandated retail prices are quite illegal in the EU so retailers are competitively squeezing their margins the entire year, not just for one week in November.

In all honesty I get better prices and quicker delivery from Ebay than i would on Amazon on Black Friday....makes no difference to me at all

Unfortunately I find eBay absolutely awful to use. More often than not eBay still just looks super sketchy for basically anything I'd consider buying online. On two occasions I accidentally ordered products from China which ended up being stuck in customs. Additionally, I found the eBay app to be absolutely awful, both as a buyer and an occasional seller.

Those problems were much worse a few years ago, but instead of eBay getting significantly better, Amazon got much much worse. Amazon is being flooded with cheap knockoff Chinese products that often seem very questionable in regards of quality and safety.

For many things that I end up buying I just use a shopping search engine such as Geizhals or idealo. It is very very rare that Amazon is among the cheapest shops for any product I'm looking for

It is very popular in Europe thanks to hard work of marketing departments. Because of it holiday season with high sales starts one month earlier.

Retail needs sales days to generate deals/content/buzz around, give them a reason to advertise to/ contact customers. It doesn’t really matter what the event ends up being called, they just jump on whatever is already associated with sales days.

Everything is popular, one retailer even had the Singles day in Denmark this year.

Singles Day is starting to take hold in Germany as well, hundreds of shops already celebrated it.

Just for the unaware, 11/11, originating from China, as some sort of a counter to the Valentine's day.

This was the first year I've noticed it in Europe.

I was in Paraguay ten years ago and Black Friday was a big retail event. It was odd because they were actually using the English words 'Black Friday' though everything else was in Spanish.

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