Bubble tea is a tea-based drink that originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s. Taiwanese immigrants brought it to the United States in the 1990s, initially in California through regions including Los Angeles County, but the drink has also spread to other countries where there is a large East Asian diaspora population.
Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated after Christmas Day, occurring on the second day of Christmastide. Though it originated as a holiday to give gifts to poor people, today, Boxing Day forms part of Christmas celebrations, with many people choosing to take advantage of Boxing Day sales. It originated in Great Britain and is celebrated in several countries that previously formed part of the British Empire. The attached bank holiday or public holiday may take place on 28 December if necessary to ensure it falls on a weekday. Boxing Day is also concurrent with the Christian festival Saint Stephen's Day.
Inter IKEA Systems B.V., doing business as IKEA, is a Swedish multinational conglomerate based in the Netherlands that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, decoration, home accessories, and various other goods and home services. Started in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad and currently headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is derived from an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd.
Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage, transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The word is also used to refer to a period of time during which such bans are enforced.
Buy Nothing Day is a minor event of protest against consumerism. In North America, the United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden, Buy Nothing Day is held the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, concurrent to Black Friday; elsewhere, it is held the following day, which is the last Saturday in November. Buy Nothing Day was founded in Vancouver by artist Ted Dave and subsequently promoted by Adbusters based in Canada.
Black Friday is a colloquial term for the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season in the United States. Many stores offer highly promoted sales at discounted prices and often open early, sometimes as early as midnight or even on Thanksgiving. Some stores' sales continue to Monday or for a week.
In the United States, public holidays are set by federal, state, and local governments and are often observed by closing government offices or giving government employees paid time off. The federal government does not require any private business to close or offer paid time off, as is the case for most state local governments, so employers determine which holidays to observe.
QVC is an American free-to-air television network and a flagship shopping channel specializing in televised home shopping, owned by Qurate Retail Group. Founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel in West Chester, Pennsylvania, United States, QVC broadcasts to more than 350 million households in seven countries, including channels in the UK, Germany, Japan, and Italy, along with a joint venture in China with China National Radio called CNR Mall.
The weekdays and weekend are the complementary parts of the week devoted to labour and rest, respectively. The legal weekdays, or workweek, is the part of the seven-day week devoted to working. In most of the world, the workweek is from Monday to Friday and the weekend is Saturday and Sunday. A weekday or workday is any day of the working week. Other institutions often follow this pattern, such as places of education. The constituted weekend has varying definitions, based on determined calendar days, designated period of time, and/or regional definition of the working week. Sometimes the term "weekend" is expanded to include the time after work hours on the last workday of the week.
Cyber Monday is a marketing term for e-commerce transactions on the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It was created by retailers to encourage people to shop online. The term was coined by Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation and Scott Silverman, and made its debut on November 28, 2005, in a Shop.org press release entitled "'Cyber Monday' Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year". Cyber Monday takes place the Monday after Thanksgiving; the date falls between November 26 and December 2, depending on the year.
The Christmas season or the festive season is an annually recurring period recognized in many Western and other countries that is generally considered to run from late November to early January. It is defined as incorporating at least Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and sometimes various other holidays and festivals. It also is associated with a period of shopping which comprises a peak season for the retail sector and a period of sales at the end of the season. Christmas window displays and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies when trees decorated with ornaments and light bulbs are illuminated are traditions in many areas.
Meatless Monday and Meat Free Monday are international campaigns that encourage people to not eat meat on Mondays to improve their health and the health of the planet.
Sustainable fashion is a term describing products, processes, activities, and people that aim to achieve a carbon-neutral fashion industry built on equality, social justice, animal welfare, and ecological integrity. Sustainable fashion concerns more than fashion textiles or products, rather addressing the entire process in which clothing is produced, consumed and disposed of. The movement looks to combat the large carbon footprint that the fast fashion industry has created by reducing the environmental impact such as air pollution, water pollution and climate change.
Sustainable consumption is the use of products and services in ways that minimizes impacts on the environment. Sustainable consumption is done in a way that needs are met for present humans but also for future generations. Sustainable consumption is often paralleled with sustainable production; consumption refers to use and disposal not just by individuals and households, but also by governments, businesses, and other organizations. Sustainable consumption is closely related to sustainable production and sustainable lifestyles. "A sustainable lifestyle minimizes ecological impacts while enabling a flourishing life for individuals, households, communities, and beyond. It is the product of individual and collective decisions about aspirations and about satisfying needs and adopting practices, which are in turn conditioned, facilitated, and constrained by societal norms, political institutions, public policies, infrastructures, markets, and culture."
Record Store Day is an annual event inaugurated in 2007 to "celebrate the culture of the independently owned record store". Held on one Saturday every April and every Black Friday in November, the day brings together fans, artists, and thousands of independent record stores around the world. A number of records are pressed specifically for Record Store Day, with a list of releases for each country, and are only distributed to shops participating in the event.
Alcohol laws are laws in relation to the manufacture, use, being under the influence of and sale of alcohol or alcoholic beverages that contains ethanol. Common alcoholic beverages include beer, wine, (hard) cider, and distilled spirits. The United States defines an alcoholic beverage as "any beverage in liquid form which contains not less than one-half of one percent of alcohol by volume", but this definition varies internationally. These laws can restrict those who can produce alcohol, those who can buy it, when one can buy it, labelling and advertising, the types of alcoholic beverage that can be sold, where one can consume it, what activities are prohibited while intoxicated., and where one can buy it. In some cases, laws have even prohibited the use and sale of alcohol entirely, as with Prohibition in the United States from 1920 to 1933.
Cyber Black Friday is a marketing term for the online version of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving Day in the United States. The term made its debut in a 2009 press release entitled "Black Friday Goes Online for Cyber Black Friday". According to TechCrunch, there was $9 billion in online sales on Cyber Black Friday, which is up 21.6% from 2019. With this, the average cart-size for a shopper was $95.60, and Shopify noted that there was an average of $6.3 million spent per minute across their more than one million merchant platform. A lot of this spending was directed towards technological devices, primarily smart phones. Of the $9 billion is sales, $3.6 billion (40%) was for smart phones. However, Cyber Black Friday is still inferior to its sister, Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is primarily known to offer more discounted items, and is projected to reach sales between $11.2 billion and $13 billion in 2020. On a more promising no†e, Gian Fulgoni of comScore said, "Black Friday, better known as a shopping bonanza in brick-and-mortar retail stores, is increasingly becoming one of the landmark days in the online holiday shopping world." Some Cyber Black Friday sales are short-lived, last through the weekend, into Cyber Monday, and beyond.
Small Business Saturday is a marketing initiative created and promoted by the American Express credit card brand to encourage holiday shopping on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in the United States, during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year. This Saturday is always the last one in November, so it falls between November 24 and November 30.
A circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible. CE aims to tackle global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution by emphasizing the design-based implementation of the three base principles of the model. The three principles required for the transformation to a circular economy are: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems." CE is defined in contradistinction to the traditional linear economy. The idea and concepts of circular economy (CE) have been studied extensively in academia, business, and government over the past ten years. CE has been gaining popularity because it helps to minimize emissions and consumption of raw materials, open up new market prospects and, principally, increase the sustainability of consumption and improve resource efficiency.
The economics of Christmas are significant because Christmas is typically a high-volume selling season for goods suppliers around the world. Sales increase dramatically as people purchase gifts, decorations, and supplies to celebrate. In the U.S., the "Christmas shopping season" starts as early as October. In Canada, merchants begin advertising campaigns just before Halloween, and step up their marketing following Remembrance Day on 11 November. In the UK and Ireland, the Christmas shopping season starts from mid-November, around the time when high street Christmas lights are turned on. In the United States, it has been calculated that a quarter of all personal spending takes place during the Christmas/holiday shopping season. Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that expenditure in department stores nationwide rose from $20.8 billion in November 2004 to $31.9 billion in December 2004, an increase of 54 percent. In other sectors, the pre-Christmas increase in spending was even greater, due to a November through December buying surge of 100% in bookstores and 170% in jewelry stores. In the same year employment in American retail stores rose from 1.6 million to 1.8 million in the two months leading up to Christmas. This means that while consumers might spend more during this season, they also are given increased employment opportunities as sales rise to meet the increased demand.
