Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for some more football on a day when there usually isn’t any, but something seems weird to me about Amazon’s NFL Black Friday game.
The exciting offense of the Miami Dolphins will take on the “oh what could have been” New York Jets on the first ever NFL Black Friday game. In theory, the idea makes sense considering a lot of people have the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving week off, and people associate the holiday with football anyways.
So why not extend the football watching from Thursday and allow it to carry over into Friday? I know I certainly will be tuning in to watch it, even though the game doesn’t promise to be all that great. The NFL has me by the you-know-what when it comes to their product, and I’ll even watch an NFL blowout for some reason.
And this game could be exactly that…
But lucky for us (or maybe even not-so-lucky for us), the Amazon Black Friday football game will also be intertwined with special live deals that will link viewers to Jeff Bezo’s Amazon website to buy stuff.
During the pregame show, analyst and former NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick hit four out of four targets in a special throwing challenge to “unlock” a 30% off deal on a Harry Potter Hogwarts Lego set.
That’s what got me skeptical of this whole thing. At first, I thought it was just an idea to have another football game on another day that people would likely be home on, but like much of reasoning for why things are done nowadays, it seems like just another capitalist cash grab.
Amazon and Jeff Bezo’s real idea for the NFL game on Black Friday is to just keep people at home, and keep people buying things from Amazon. Online shopping has pretty much taken over the retail shopping industry, and this is just another step in the ultimate plan for Amazon to be the one and only place people buy things from.
So if you are tuning into the Amazon Prime Black Friday NFL game, be prepared to watch a semi-competitive football game, and be even more prepared for QR codes and “special deals” to be shoved down your throat.
