When do you shop? Is it Grey Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday for you?

Only a few years ago for most of us living in the UK words Black Friday meant a financial market disaster, a stock market catastrophe that took place on or September 24th, 1869.

These days Black Friday is universally equivalent to a maniac week of sales, high street retail bargain and online shopping offers. Few low, or care to find out, that the term was born in 1960s in the USA. Police officers in Pennsylvania called the increased trade traffic during sales which traditionally started on Friday after Thanksgiving as Black Friday.

These days with availability of over the clock internet shopping, instant deals and vast marketing budgets our inboxes are bombarded with Black Friday offers for a good few days if not weeks beforehand creating a sense of urgency to buy and fear of missing out on lucrative deals.

Black Friday has now morphed from one day sale to a whole weekend of shopping. Starting the day before on Grey Thursday, all through the weekend and on to Cyber Monday (term originally introduced in 2005 to describe the day of biggest retails spending online following the Thanksgiving weekend). And if that was not enough, the trend and norm this year seems to be a whole week and more of red sales price tags!

It is not surprising, that more and more people and businesses are choosing to ignore the mass hysteria and either boycott Black Friday sales altogether or choose alternatives, such as Buy Nothing Day, giving away all or part of Black Friday profits to charity and even closing stores and online sale to give employees a day off (perhaps to shop?).

Small Business Saturday encourages consumers to support local small business and is happening on December 1st this year. If the idea appeals to you, find out more about this movement and how to get involved here.

And what about ourselves at Dog Moda? This year you will not find any Black Friday sales on our website. In fact, you will not find large sales on our hound collars and other sighthound products on any other day of the year either.

As a small family run business, we passionately believe in what we do. We believe our products offer the best combination of quality and price, we keep our margins and stock levels low, we put individual care and attention into every products that leaves our London shop, we do not mass produce nor use wholesale manufactures in China and India, nor do we use untraceable and unethically sourced materials.

As small family business we have finite human resources and our time is best spend on crafting our hound collars and dog leads and talking to our customers, not running a full blown marketing and sales campaign based on artificially inflating prices beforehand.

As a small business we offer our end of line items at sale prices via our website, as well as donating them to various charities working with sighthounds. While Black Friday sales might give retailers an opportunity to kick-start Christmas and increase cash flow by reducing prices for just one day / week, we are proud to be able to offer our customers and their affordable realistic prices every day of the year.

So when will you be shopping this year? Is it Grey Thursday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday or maybe even Buy Nothing Day? Whatever your choice is, we hope you that you have a great weekend and include those long pointy noisy and waggiest tails! Ourselves we are all looking forward to spending the Black Friday weekend away from shops and computers with the family - a nice long walk on Saturday followed by dinner with friends, and taking Altai lure coursing on Sunday. Shop less, live more!