Black Friday – Getting caught in the rush

There are various thoughts as to where the term Black Friday originated from, one I recently heard was that it was the date that retailers expected to break even – so move from the red (making a loss) into the black. Black Friday is no longer an American phenomena, Australia, Mexico, the UK and many European countries (just to name a few) also now run similar events.

In recent times you could argue it is so-called because of the havoc it wreaks. People die in the rushes that Black Friday creates. Some sources state that the day has claimed as many as 100+ lives in the last decade. Many hundreds of people are injured every year in the stampedes and commotion that have become associated with the day. Today the BBC are reporting on a Tesco which has had to close its doors this morning, due to what it calls ‘scuffles’ amongst customers.

Whilst physical stores are experiencing high volumes of customers, I suspect their online stores are experiencing many many more. Retailers have known that Black Friday was coming all year, so they are all super prepared aren’t they? It appears not.

Many retailers websites have been experiencing higher than normal volumes of traffic today. They expected that though. So why if they were expecting this have many hight profile sites gone down?

Argos – a previously struggling UK retailer – appears to be turning itself around, yet on what will almost certainly be its websites busiest day of the year, customers have to wait to access their site.

I didn’t think they would let this happen, so tried to click through to Argos.co.uk but was greeted with this page.

Argos website down on Black Friday

I followed their advice and refreshed the page a few minutes later, and amazingly the site worked! I did try again in a different browser a little later on and I got the same message, however again after a few minutes, it cleared.

On any other day of the year, customers would find this completely unacceptable, so why on its busiest day, did Argos let its site get swamped?

Argos wasn’t alone though. Currys site was also offline for many visitors. Unlike Argos Currys gave an estimated time that they would let me in.

They predicted around 20 minutes when I first joined the queue (yes I joined a queue to enter a website) but by the time I finally got in it had been well over an hour.

Curries crush - Black Friday

Currys Black Friday queue to get into their website

What I can’t understand is why their sister site, PC World, had no waiting time yet it took me over an hour to get onto the Currys homepage. When I was in everything seemed to load pretty sharpish, so I don’t know why there was such a long wait. Surely more people on a slower connection is better than a handful loading fast?

Tesco Direct by far was the worst though. Despite being the second largest retailer in the world (as measured by revenues) the wait to get into the Tesco Direct shop was ridiculous. After at least an hour an a half, Tesco’s 30 second refresh countdown timer was still going. Every 30 seconds it was checking if there was space to let me in, and there never was.

I don’t know what Tesco were offering – and I suspect many people will never know – because honestly, who is going to wait by their computer for more than 90 minutes to access a website?

Tesco offline during Black Friday

Tesco’s Black Friday Calamity, customers can’t access Tesco Direct for hours.

So what lesson does this teach us? Well if you are a big retailer, who is taking part in Black Friday, make sure you invest in the appropriate infrastructure before the day, or else you could miss out on a huge number of potential sales.

Internet Information Laws

Internet Snooping

Once again the regulation of the Internet and collection of private data is in the UK news. According to the BBC, Home Secretary Teresa May is to outline a bill that will force firms to hand details to police regarding who was using a phone or computer at a particular time.

UK Government Intervention

Providers would have to keep data that links devices to users. In effect the Police want to know the IP address that the machine was allocated at any particular time, this is information that the companies currently do not keep as it is of no commercial value to them.

This is not the first time the UK Government has tried to pass legislation however that would enable large scale surveillance of Internet use, but the previous bill was dropped when they realized that it would not pass. Some think (and say) that this new proposal will be the start of an attempt to re-frame the argument and push a re-worded proposal whose aim will be similar to the last attempt.

My own opinion however is that this may all be a bit of a diversion, as the providers already have access to all of this and much more information and can do what they want with it. They are not democratically elected and so do not answer to the people. They are multinational, or probably more correctly sopra-national, and can realistically avoid national laws that may make life difficult for them. They can move operations, move storage facilities, change customer agreements, and do not have to justify their actions to anyone.

The Bigger Picture?

The idea that the government should not have access to this information is well worth thinking about, but governments are under some obligation to the people that they represent. They get access to the information that the providers want to give them. It will not be possible for the police or any other state organization to use raw data as they do not have the personnel to carry out such work, so they will have to be provided with already worked data.

Where and how this data is stored, how it will be processed, who will have access to it, what will be done with it in the future, how safe it is, what rights the users have, international law, privacy, responsibility, and any number of other issues you can think of should all be raised.

Once more the flow of information is in the hands of the big boys. It might not be right to worry so much about what a government might do with our data but better to worry about the data that the providers themselves have. Governments are asking for information from companies that already have it, that is the problem.

All of the above is of course my own opinion!

Glocalism

glocal

This week I have had an article published in an international peer reviewed journal called Glocalism. The article is about food production, and reports on many of the arguments that I touched upon in my recent food series.

The article, rather catchily entitled “Collective food Purchasing Networks in Italy as a Case Study of Responsible Innovation” by J. Hankins and C. Grasseni is free and can be downloaded here. It is slightly more of an academic article than my blog writing, is co-authored with anthropologist Cristina Grasseni, and reports our joint fieldwork looking at alternative food production networks in Italy and the USA.

Glocalism

As I said above the article is in the journal Glocalism, which is all about glocalism. So what is glocalism? Well it is all in the name, it is being local and global at the same time. To take part of the explanation offered by the Globus and Locus Association

“The term “glocalism” identifies the momentous changes generated by globalization, changes which have resulted in a permanent intertwining of the global and the local dimensions. In fact, there is no longer any place on the planet which has not been touched to a growing degree by various types of global flows and, at the same time, there are no global flows which are not increasingly parsed according to the many different characteristics of the places”.

Do you agree with this? That globalism means that the local can only exist in relation to the global? Or that globalization has effected every corner of the world?

Globalization

If we think about changes in the environment that maybe we should accept this line. If we think about how event in one part of the world effect others (or all) then we can see the local as part of a global system. If we look for local solutions to a problem are we in some way involving the global? If we are talking about anything that has to do with poverty, or pollution, or the environment, or anything related to technology, then we would probably have to accept that these are not local issues, but global. A house in Detroit is not sold for $1000 because of the state of Detroit, but because the world that Detroit is in has produced a situation that makes a house in Detroit (some areas) worth $1000.

If we think about technology use through this framework, we can see how much the Internet (to give one example) is taking the local and moving it into the global. The proportion of our world’s population living in cities of a million or more has risen from thirty-seven percent in 1970 to fifty percent today. By 2030 more than two-thirds of world population will be in large cities, and most of them will be in Asia. Why is this? Well one reason is the need to operate via high speed Internet. The infrastructure is in the big cities, and it has become a necessary part of working life.

So the fact that a city in India or Thailand has high speed Internet infrastructure effects mobility across the globe, the local and the global are entwined. This has an effect on food production capability, transport, the environment, and everything else you might like to think about across the globe.

How about that for a thought on an autumn morning in front of the computer in the Netherlands or a wintry start to a New York day shovelling snow?