BUY NOTHING DAY | Happiness is not on sale at the store

It is the time of the year when we see lines of people outside stores and shopping mall waiting for the doors to open so that they could charge in. The army of consumers, shivering with the Black Friday fever, attacks the counters and shelves on departmental stores. There are sales on everything; from USB sticks to boxes of ramen noodles, and from unicycles to senior citizen walking sticks.The Black Friday’s imported craze and rage and the overspending and overconsumption have been hitting Britain’s population hard. It is the time that we, as a people, take a pause and analyse why we have the desire to have MORE needlessly!

Almost everyone reading this article has been to these sales and has been a witness to all sorts of unethical acts, of people trying to pull TVs and Xboxes out of each other’s hands and entering into a brawl. It is not even December, and most of us are being bombarded by junk mail and adverts, both online and through our mailboxes. Corporations are minting money just by letting us know that there is a sale, and for a brief time, we probably do think that we have achieved something spectacular by buying a rice cooker on a discount.

Blenders or extra rolls of toilet paper or even those trendy branded shoes would not buy us happiness – that’s for sure. Instead, new travel experiences and social interactions award us with pleasure and comfort. Nothing exposes us more to humanity and the love that people extend than when we are on a trip to a distant land, in a position to appreciate humanity with all its charms and flaws.

So, put down those six bottles of Vicks VapoRub on a 20% discount. Nobody needs that many shoes or even cosmetics because that is what it is – a mask! Let’s fix the hole inside our soul and travel to the destination of your dreams. Get away from it all. Stop wasting money on materialism and invest some on yourself – on your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.

People in the UK are waking up to this realisation. To travel is to amass experiences, to understand life and the human condition. No amount of clothes or shoes and electronics let you sense that. TravelhouseUK has also seen this trend and has offered a few deals to its UK clientele purely because of this reason. However, we are not the only ones who have understood and reacted positively to this trend.

Thomas Cook Airlines and the TUI Group, of which the airline is a part of, have been running promotions all week. They have launched a cheap flight searching tool that quickly sifts through all of Thomas Cook routes to get you the most inexpensive flights on a significant discount. TUI Group’s promotion is now two days longer than that of the last year’s. This year, a prize winner can win an entire holiday refund, and the travel company is offering a discount of up to £100 pounds on the medium-haul and up to £150 on long-haul flights.

G Adventures has also recognised this pattern and has launched its “Biggest Ever Cyber Week Sale”. The company has offered a discount of up to 35% on all tours starting from December 2018 to July 2019. G Adventures Managing Director, Brian Young said, “G Adventures has been offering the Cyber Sale promotion to cover Black Friday and Cyber Monday for the last two years. Our company has experienced booking growth every year, and our cyber weekend sales evolved from being purely online transactions to both online and offline, across the UK retail market.”

He also added that

Our Company has increased the number of travel agents within our call centre this Black Friday week, to service the higher number of calls and emails from both direct travellers and agents.

Scenic, a cruise operator, known to offer luxurious cruises and tours, has reported a 140% increase in business on this Black Friday week as compared to the one in 2017 already. This time, Scenic is said to celebrate and extend its Black Friday Sale week by three more days.

In conclusion, buying products from an overcrowded store, especially getting things that you do not urgently need, even on a discount, is not something through which one can squeeze out any happiness. Travelling the world is a more profitable and wholesome experience than buying any amount of shoes, clothes or electronic products. Over time, all those shoes will become worn, and the new laptop would grow old and slow down, but the memories you make on your adventure escape will only mature as you share them with your new friends. Visiting your dream destination would make you happy and intrigued and challenged and excited; emotions we all genuinely enjoy; feelings that make us human; emotions that we actually search for in the clamorous aisles of shopping stores this Black Friday.