For those outside of the USA, it's the day after American (as opposed to Canadian) Thanksgiving, also known as Black Friday as it is the busiest shopping day of the year. For those inside the USA, welcome to hell.

Ever since Andy and I learned about the existence of Black Friday, we have disliked it intensely. Just about everything it stands for goes against what we believe in. It's the ultimate "celebration" of consumerism, of ruining the planet just that little bit quicker. It's the worse day to just enjoy some time at the mall with your family, or wider community. Even though I live in the US now with my family, we've never had any urge to participate.

But from time to time we get asked if we will do something special for Black Friday, or its online Lucifer Cyber Monday. While the answer is obviously NO, we've wondered if there is more we can do. We haven't figured out anything particularly interesting as a counter-activity for OPEN, but I do admire what two companies have done.

The first is Patagonia, who last year donated their entire Black Friday revenue to its environmental causes. Think about that for a while, not a "a percentage of profits" as greenwashing companies often do, not "a percentage of sales", but the entire sales amount. So  they ended up selling $10 million last year (over 10x their normal sales volume). They may have made a million dollars net profit, but they donated the full $10 million. That's insane. Insanely great.



The other one is REI, who last year closed all its stores, still paid its employees and launched the hashtag #OptOutside to encourage everybody to enjoy the outdoors instead of going shopping. We're not sure how that would meaningfully translate into something for OPEN, but the least  I decided I could do was to close my computer and go enjoy the outdoors. We hope you are too, and see you Monday!