Here at Athena London, we are dedicated to creating a revolutionary retailer with as little environmental damage as possible. For this reason we have decided to opt out of offering any Black Friday deals or discounts in an effort to encourage more responsible consumer behaviours.
We choose not to discount our products for any purpose other than a personal referral code (Link, ALUMNI) so as not to devalue the magic of our products and to show respect to our loyal customers who believe in our business enough to purchase at full price.
The environmental impact of Black Friday
The impact of Black Friday deals is much larger than you might think. From the mass production needed to meet the ever-growing demands of overconsumption to the carbon impact of delivering online orders. In their report” The Dirty Delivery Report; counting the carbon cost of online shopping”, Money.co.uk claims that British Black Friday home deliveries this year will churn out 429,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of 435 return flights from London to New York.
This is all before we even include the impact of disposing last year’s electronics, fashions and toys. The encouragement from large corporations to spend, upgrade or replace your belongings benefits no one except the large corporations themselves. Small businesses are often unable to compete with the deals being offered by chain stores and struggle to sustain their livelihoods while corporations with retail empires rake in the profits and refuse to pay their workers a living wage.
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