We recorded this episode in early November, on election days of all days, but this episode isn’t about voting. It’s also a few days after the time change, but we didn’t talk about that. Instead, we wanted to focus on Black Friday shopping since the episode will be released on Thanksgiving Day in the United States.
We mostly hopped on to talk about whether this particular day does much to help the economy. We eventually talked about the potential impact of holiday shopping broadly on the economy and whether or not stores should be open on Thanksgiving.
In this episode, we discuss:
* Jadrian’s unwillingness to fight through Black Friday crowds
* The economic impact of Black Friday
* Whether stores stores be open on Thanksgiving
* Some of our first Amazon purchases
* And a whole lot more!
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Some show notes:
Matt and Jadrian kicked off the show with Sunshine Greetings from Central 28 Beer Company, another gift from Tim Dye who brought us the beers at JET SET. So far, Tim has been 2/2 on beer selections since we both ended up liking this one.
Matt and Jadrian discuss the economic impact of Black Friday, and neither think the improvement to the economy is too high. There is a lot of activity–but we both think that the money would have been spent elsewhere, at some point, in the absence of Black Friday. Therefore, it doesn’t actually lead to an improved economy. Small Business Saturday may have some impact locally, but Cyber Monday may be the worst for a local economy.
Since a lot of Black Friday spending is centered around getting gifts for other people, we had to make sure we talked about our very first episode on the efficiency of gift-giving:
The conversation also touches on whether or not the economy is rebounding from an unrecognized recession or if the economy is contracting, how many packages get delivered in NYC per day, our own personal Amazon purchase history, willingness to endure Black Friday sales, and a lot more! Go check out your Amazon account and let us know in the comments about your first-ever Amazon purchase!
This week’s pop culture references:
Jadrian shared a project he worked on with Brian Lynch a few years ago on identifying economics scenes in the series Superstore. There was an episode dedicated to Black Friday, which had a lot of good scenes in it:
Matt went with a song from The Kinks called The Moneygoround, which talks about the idea of a money multiplier and how money circulates within an economy:
