Government campaign against consumerism during Black Friday triggers anger among retailers in France

The television campaign of French Agency for Ecological Transition (Ademe) It has sparked controversy, even within the French government, divided between environmental imperatives and those of economic growth.

In a television advertisement from the Ademe agency, a man holds up two t-shirts for sale and looks at them, bewildered. He calls an employee and asks him. “Which one would you take?” “Honestly? Neither,” replies the man wearing a badge that says “seller.”

On the eve of the official launch of Black Friday the height of discount shopping, the campaign was met with astonishment from retailers, who feared an impact on their sales during the crucial end-of-year period.

The campaign consists of several advertisements showing that consumers are discouraged from purchasing new products at appliance stores, home improvement stores and online sites.

“We ask Ademe to immediately withdraw its advertising, under penalty of considering legal proceedings for commercial discredit,” announced the Alliance du Commerce, the Union des Industries Textiles and the Union Française des Industries de la Mode and Clothing, in a joint press release.

The head of France’s leading supermarket chain, Michel-Édouard Leclerc, criticized the campaign on the social network X for “inappropriate advertising at a time when the French textile sector is in the doldrums”. “Surely we can get people to support a policy of sobriety without snubbing professionals,” he said.

On Thursday, the French Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, described the campaign as “clumsy” in relation to “commerce, particularly physical commerce”.

But Christophe Béchu, French Minister for Ecological Transition, refused to remove the advertisements, “accepting” that they had been broadcast.

“That 0.2% of advertising broadcast time is devoted to asking whether all purchases are useful frankly does not seem unreasonable, given the challenges of the ecological transition,” he argued on France Inter.

“We should have sent the same message to online sales platforms and not to physical stores,” he admitted.

The environmental NGO France Nature Environnement, for its part, “congratulated” Ademe, while Mouvement Impact France, a federation of social economy entrepreneurs, welcomed the “awareness necessary to transform our model” .

“Sobriety is not only a sine qua non condition for achieving our environmental goals, but also a common sense approach for our economy and our businesses,” the movement declared.