Canadian skincare company says no to Black Friday

Annie Bergeron-Oliver discusses the impact Black Friday sales are having on Canadian businesses as the shopping event becomes a month-long affair.

Black Friday is a time for great deals and big savings, but one skincare company is refusing to participate.

The Ordinary, a skincare company based out of Toronto, is opting out of Black Friday for the seventh year. Instead of deals, The Ordinary posted a “Guide to Spotting a Fake Deal” PSA on their website.

“Black Friday has become synonymous with impulsive buying, and many businesses capitalize on that rush,” the company wrote on its website. “What used to be one day of frenzied shopping has evolved into an entire season of sales.”

• READ MORE: Black Friday the ‘pinnacle’ for businesses in a struggling economy
• READ MORE: Canadian shoppers taking advantage of pre-Black Friday deals

But “an entire season of sales” might not be so bad, according to David Soberman, an expert in online shopping.

The change to online markets and a longer sales window is “simply reflecting how consumers have changed over the years,” Soberman told CTV News in an interview Friday. He says people might fall for the sales and buy things they don’t really need, but “in most cases, people do this once or twice, and then they learn that they’ve got to be more discerning.”

Fake deals

The Ordinary had advice for consumers who might be lured by the magic of Black Friday. They focused on being intentional with your shopping and skeptical of deals, and warned of shrinkflation: when companies shrink the size of a product without changing the price to match.

“Know that ‘limited editions’ sometimes aren’t,” The Ordinary warned, suggesting that adding a sense of timeliness to a deal can sometimes just be a marketing tactic.

They also advised to “watch out for old or fluctuating prices that are newly labelled as Black Friday discounts.”

• WATCH: What happened to the Black Friday frenzy shoppers once raced toward?

Soberman says that with online shopping, comparing prices has become easier. Instead of being limited by the merchandise of a single brick-and-mortar shop, people can use the internet to quickly compare prices.

“You can easily go and check on Amazon to see whether the price for the exact same product is better or worse,” he said, adding that this has made the market “much more price sensitive.”

People generally go shopping already knowing what they’re looking for, Soberman said, and will create a “benchmark” price for a product they want to buy, then evaluate deals off of that baseline

Soberman also pushed back against some of The Ordinary’s assertions, saying that he thinks “most people are more careful at shopping.”

“Once you’ve been burned once or twice, you become a lot more careful,” he said.