As Boxing Day Sales begin, we look back at Pretty Little Thing’s 99% flash sale ran on Black Friday.
Black Friday 2020. Online retailer Pretty Little Thing fashion dropped their black Friday sale with up to 99% off items. The sale started at midnight and quickly sold out, with the deal including coats that were £70 available for 70p and dresses dropping from £30 to just 30p. Customers that were quick enough were ecstatic with their purchases, whilst those who narrowly missed out turned to twitter to vent their frustrations, alongside others who tweeted not just to complain about the sales but the ethics behind it.
Individuals that managed get their hands on items in the Black Friday sale seemed to be ecstatic with their purchases. One girl, Jessica Simpson, tweeted “Guess who just got 56 items for £28 on plt?? So happy. The best deal ever!!”
Others who weren’t so lucky took to the site to talk about how they didn’t get a chance to even look what was in the sale and wanted a chan ce to access the same deals.
A spokesperson for PLT told Insider: “As part of our Black Friday campaign, we are offering customers in the UK 99% off selected lines while stock lasts. After a bleak 2020 for most of us, we wanted to offer something competitive and understand people may be spending less in what is usually peak shopping season.”
However good PLT claims their intentions were, they still took no consideration of the ethical factors for people who would be affected. This isn’t the first time that PLT has been seen as being unethical as in July of this year it was revealed they were paying workers in their UK factories just £3.50 an hour when the average minimum wage is £8.20.
It made people question how much the workers are getting payed to produce the clothing for the Black Friday Sale and, ultimately, how they’re treated.
Pretty Little Thing’s website has a page on sustainability where they claim “looking after the planet is more important than ever, and like many others we want to help create a more sustainable future”.
However, from the sale, we have to question whether the page was put there to make them look like their contributing to help our planet or if, in reality, it’s a marketing ploy, so more people buy from PLT.
We have to ask where does all the clothing go afterwards and how does it affect the planet we live on? The UK based charity WRAP (The Waste and Resources Action Programme) has estimated that £140 million worth of clothing goes into landfills each year, and a staggering £30 billion worth of unused clothing is still sitting in our wardrobes nationwide.
This level of waste is enough to fill 459 Olympic-size swimming pools, and , if action isn’t taken, one quarter of our total impact on climate change will be due to clothes consumption by 2050. If this is the impact in an average year just imagine how much PLT have contributed the climate change with this sale.
‘Gen-Z’ are often said to be the generation that’s going to put a stop to fast fashion and be sustainable to save our planet for the future, but that same generation are the customers buying of PLT who sold the website out in a matter of minutes.
It’s easy to look at a sale like this and feel as though you missed out on bargain finds, especially in 2020 when many have lost jobs and faced financial difficulty,
However, we have to remember that the feelings of missing out on the sale or the joy of your 13p heels comes nowhere near as close as how our planet is going to be affected.
Whilst Pretty Little Thing and their customers who managed to buy items at the discounted price of 99% benefited greatly; as PLT would have made a massive profit and customers got a large amount of clothes for a small price, the company ended up with a lot of bad press which can damage there brand greatly.
Also, the amount of clothes sold in that single day will no doubt impact the future of our planet. The question to ask ourselves is, “is what’s in our wardrobe more important than the planet we live on and what our children’s children will live on one day? Do you want to be a contributing factor to human extinction?”