Black Friday will be celebrated on November 25th, the day in which companies offer exceptional offers. For us at ULTRASOUNDtech™, however, this date will be an opportunity to reflect on consumer choices and the way of doing business in a historical moment of particular fragility for the planet.
For this reason we have chosen to close our e-commerce from 21st to 28th November 2022, with an initiative that we have baptised Blackout, to oppose the logic of compulsive consumption through an inability to shop on our site.
What will actually happen? From November 21st, anyone who logs into our site will see a dark screen appear, with the glitch effect of the TV when it no longer broadcasts channels.
Our choice goes against the trend with the policy of many companies, which will take advantage of Black Friday (which, often, is not reduced to a single day but to an entire week) to increase profits thanks to extra discounts.
But what not everyone knows is that not only does Black Friday represent a greedy opportunity to make purchases at discounted prices, it is also a recurrence which inflicts a hard knock on the environment. The more purchases are sold, more items are dispatched and there are more CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere. But that’s not all: to satisfy the enormous demand for products that is concentrated in this period of the year, mineral and water resources are exploited to the maximum; the large low-cost fashion chains impose an even more onerous commitment on their employees (who already receive an extremely low salary) and the packaging of the items involves the use of enormous quantities of plastic.
All this means a serious offence for our Planet, already extensively exploited and constantly suffering.
With the Blackout initiative, however, we don’t want to focus the spotlight only on the environmental impact of Black Friday but also offer food for thought on how to shop. We must not buy things just for the sake of it, but only when there is a real need for them: the era of unbridled consumerism is over, today the era of conscious consumption must begin.