Buy Nothing this Black Friday
Posted on November 27, 2025
Today we are offering you some peace and quiet amongst the offers, deals, promotions and products.
We invite you to join us in quietly enjoying Buy Nothing Day.
Why we support Buy Nothing Day
In 2024 we embraced Black Friday for the first time. We offered 50% off our gift vouchers for our treasure hunts - a huge discount we’d never offered before.
It worked! According to the numbers it was a success. We sold loads of vouchers, acquired loads of new customers and felt super busy and productive during a normally quiet period.
But it was an empty win.
We spent hours writing and posting gift vouchers. Time we could have spent improving our games.
We traded long-term improvements for short-term sales.
We supported a day of consumption and consumerism. Things we don’t love, that go against our values.
We buy second-hand
Since we started in 2019 we’ve always bought second-hand and made stuff last.
- We buy phones second-hand and make them last for 3 years.
- For computers it’s 5 years.
From our 2022 Carbon Assument by LJMU:
Treasure Hunt Tours Ltd. efforts is committed with sustainable practices such as using second hand IT electrical items and recycle the old ones. … it was estimated that the company consumes 8.2kg of second-hand IT electrical devices per year. This is particularly important due to the high emissions attributed to this type of material. For each kg of new IT electrical item, it is estimated that 24.87kg of CO2eq are emitted. Therefore, the company is saving around 204kg of CO2eq annually by using second-hand items.
Making computers and phones is very energy intensive.
Buying second-hand reduces our company’s emissions by about 10% every year.
Black Friday: buy new stuff you don’t need
Black Friday tempts us to buy stuff because it seems cheap not because we need it.
It’s hard to resist a great bargain. But this leads to chucking out perfectly good stuff.
That’s a disaster for energy usage, emissions and the climate crisis.
When bargains aren’t bargains
In 2024 Which? discovered that most discounts are fake:
Every year, we analyse Black Friday deals across the UK and compare the prices to the six months before and after the sales weekend. Our 2024 investigation revealed that 92% of Black Friday deals analysed were the same price or cheaper at other times of the year.
Source: which.co.uk
Many companies use Black Friday to pretend things are cheap when they aren’t. That’s disrespectful and dishonest to customers.
Black Friday? No thanks
Today we’re opting out of Black Friday.
Today we’ll buy nothing.
We invite you to join us.
