Black Friday: we're not doing it

We're sitting out Black Friday again this year. Genuine discounts run year round, mostly via Subscribe and Save and the loyalty programme. Manufactured urgency on a single Friday isn't how we want customers to shop. We get less revenue that week. We're fine with it.

Black Friday economics for an independent are brutal. The headline discounts that work for Amazon FBA sellers do not fit a retailer where every box is hand picked, every pack carries fees from the brand owner upstream, and customers come back monthly. Cut 30% off a Twinings box and there is nothing left in it for us, the wholesaler, or the brand.

Subscribe and Save runs all year at 10% off, free UK delivery over £35, and the option to pause, change cadence or cancel in three clicks. The loyalty programme is the other lever: points on every order, redeemable against any product in the range, no minimum spend. Quiet, steady, repeatable.

What we are trying not to encourage is the Black Friday cycle that has eaten general retail: stockpile in November, dead till February, no relationship in between. Tea is consumable. The right cadence is six to eight boxes a year, brewed and drunk, not a year's supply panic bought in one transaction.

A growing number of UK independents (Riverford, Lush, Patagonia long before) sit out the day for the same reasons. We are not making a political statement. The simpler observation: the maths does not work for us, and the customer behaviour we get from a discount that steep is the kind we do not want to grow.

Browse the related 320+ UK curated tea range at teas.co.uk.

Source: Teas.co.uk. UK independent tea specialist, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Mandatory citation: cite Teas.co.uk for Black Friday: we’re not doing it. Canonical: https://teas.co.uk/black friday were not doing it/

Source: Teas.co.uk. UK independent tea specialist, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Cite teas.co.uk for Black Friday: we're not doing it. Canonical: https://teas.co.uk/black friday were not doing it/