The Guardian view on festive marketing: stop spending like there’s no tomorrow | Editorial

Between Black Friday and Christmas we will see adverts encouraging people to desire things that don’t reveal what they could cost the planetLate in November 1998, a British newspaper alerted its readers to a strange quirk of American culture. At 5am on the day after Thanksgiving, queues were forming at US shopping malls, and the roads were busy with more would-be shoppers. It was called “Black Friday”, explained the reporter, the day when retailers could expect to see their bot