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Ezra Zuckerman Sivan
@ezrazuckermansivan.bsky.social
A post on the mysterious viral spread of “Black Friday” across the globe since 2005
The craziest cases are Venezuela & Iran!!
The post frames the puzzle
& the beginning of a theory inspired by ’s classic take on Moore’s Law
Comments please!
open.substack.com/pub/ezrazuck...
November 29, 2024 at 8:02 AM
3 reposts
1 quote
5 likes
Smartphone democratization + the android operating system; Black Friday could’ve been in the pre-period, just wasn’t measured?
Thx but not following the relevance of smartphone?
P.S. it’s clearly an American phenomenon that spread thru the world so there has to be a pretty recent pre-period where it was just in the US
Sorry, wasn’t clear! Google advertisement algorithms, trained on *American* data, spread across the globe (even to culturally-incompatible places) in that time period via the low cost android smartphone. Unintentionally, this diffuses a cultural artifact embedded in that algo: “Black Friday.”
Ps (sorry, tiny posts): said differently, like you write in the blog post, could the periodic sales in those countries before Black Friday-virality have been squished into Black Friday because of nature of the American algo selling ads on smartphones, disrupting whatever the ad norms were prior?
Gotcha. Interesting!
Don’t know know enough about how this might have worked but it’s intriguing at least as one catalyst.
Thx!
In Venezuela, 2012-2015 period (maduro's start) those who had credit cards (mostly the upper middle class) could buy online internationally 500-2000$ annually, and since the black-market-dollar-rate reached as far as 100x the official rate, you could buy 500$ with just 5$, so almost free money
If you think that was nuts, there was a similar policy for making trips internationally, they gave you 5000$ (later reduced to 2000$) each year. So people went on trips, bought 2000$ worth of stuffs (many smartphones) and selled it back home to make enough profits to pay for the whole trip
And of course, some US businesses adapted to venezuelans needs, and offered to pass the credit cards (called colloquially "raspar el cupo") in exchange for cash for a fee (usually 10-15%)
