How Amazon’s secret weapon is wreaking havoc on Britain’s retailers

Black Friday, Amazon’s post-Thanksgiving shopping bonanza, makes sense in America. But not in the UK, says John Stepek. Here, it’s laying waste to retailers’ most profitable time of year.

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Black Friday makes little sense for UK retailers
(Image credit: Alex McBride)

It's a Christmas tradition, like hanging out your stocking or eating your sprouts or complaining about the moral decline represented by chocolate Advent calendars.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.