Insta-Spiration to #OptOutside on Black Friday
Here are 17 ways to rebel against America’s biggest retail holiday
In 2015, REI executives began to seriously question their corporate involvement in the country's biggest annual bargain bender, given the fact that Americans generate a cool million tons of extra waste between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So, the outdoor retail monolith shuttered its doors, suspended online sales, provided all 12,000-some employees with a paid day off, arranged for upwards of a thousand state and local parks to waive entrance fees on Black Friday, and partnered with 170 organizations to take to the internet and encourage would-be shoppers to eschew sales to get outside with their loved ones. Thus was born the hashtag #OptOutside.
That first year, more than 1.4 million people posted the tag to social media, prompting Ad Age to praise #OptOutside as the “future of marketing.” Over the next three years, the campaign continued to blow up. REI now offers an experiential search engine that compiles thousands of photos depicting various outdoor adventures culled from the canons of Instagram (which now boasts more than 6 million #OptOutside posts), allowing users to scroll through photos by activity, seek out adventures and outings in a particular area, and even click on photos of trails to find out real-time info concerning location, reviews, and difficulty. The shirking of consumerism has truly never been so well organized.
In pursuit of some ideas for how to spend your outdoor holiday? Sierra scoured Instagram for a range of the most inspiring ways to skip long lines and mall parking lots. Whether you’re “shopping” for an epic trek, a chill stroll, or a family picnic in a park, nature makes for our most powerful healer, and one heck of an antidote to tryptophan comas. Here are 17 #OptOutside posts from Black Fridays past that’ll get you thinking about how exactly you could opt in to the great outdoors tomorrow.
1. Nothing at the mall is free—so find a national or state park that’s waived Black Friday entrance fees. Check this list.
2. Wrangle your friends, grab your family, and try to rope in someone who doesn’t typically opt outside! After all, studies show that connecting with the natural world not only improves your mental and physical health, but also improves the health of society. That’s because the connections we make in outdoor spaces strengthen communities and bring people together.
3. Expose your kids to their new favorite antiholiday and make opting outside an annual post-Thanksgiving tradition.
4. You know what’ll make your dog a lot happier than being cooped up while you hit the big-box stores? Getting to go outside with you. Check out these pups, who according to Instagram are performing “community service to keep our pawrents away from da malls.”
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5. Give back to the earth by nourishing it with plants. Find out whether local community gardens could use your family’s help tomorrow.
6. Get into the swing of turning mass consumption on its head.
7. Scope out all the shades sunset comes in this season.
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8. Strike an al fresco pose. Give nature a hearty “namaste.”
9. Take a cue from this woman who conquered her first 14-er on Black Friday, and set an ambitious adventure goal. Take advantage of having a full day off to achieve it!
10. Now is one of the less crowded times of year to frequent beaches, lakes, and rivers. So consider kicking off the holiday season with a celebratory splash.
11. Do you nerd out on jingle bells and ugly Christmas sweaters? Is the holiday season your most magical time of year? Take your festive spirit right out into nature.
12. Pencil in some quality outdoor hang time.
13. Get really high.
14. Find some cool rocks.
15. Consider scaling them.
16. Bask in a sunbeam while doing a plank on a tree. Or just find your own form of joy in the great outdoors.
17. Remember, chasing rainbows > bargain-hunting, any day. (But perhaps particularly on Black Friday.)