It’s Black Friday and with just over a month to go before Christmas the holiday shopping season has begun in earnest. The term Black Friday didn’t come into vogue until the 1980’s but the shopping season got into high gear on the Friday after American Thanksgiving Day since the early 1950’s. Black Friday has apparently been the busiest shopping Day in the United States since the mid-2000’s and many Canadians used to head south of the border to cash in on all the deals that were offered in stores. That obviously tapered off when our dollar fell. Nowadays our local retailers offer good deals for Black Friday shoppers. I was thinking that this would be a great year to make sure and go Christmas shopping in person due to the uncertainty of on-time delivery for items ordered online due to the rotating postal strikes across the country. There was a news item about all the containers of goods lined up at our major airports waiting to be unloaded and delivered by Canada Post. The federal government says they are prepared to order an end to the rotating strikes if a deal isn’t reached soon but even if that happens, Canada Post is warning we can expect delays of delivery of mail and parcels into the New Year. So instead of taking the chance of ordering online we are better off to shop “offline” in-person in our local stores this holiday season.
That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.