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Cape Town - Black Friday, the biggest shopping event of the year, can be likened to "pushing kids in to a candy store wondering what’s going to happen".
That's according to Roger Brown, the CEO of debt counselling firm Credit Matters.
"It is made with all the bells and whistles to get people into the malls as quickly as possible, and to spend as much as they can, so as debt counsellors we are very concerned about it," he says.
Brown says the concern of debt counsellors does not stem from people spending per se - as people spend money every day - but rather from irresponsible spending, which could have a huge impact on their lives later on.
'I think that people need to be responsible at this time,"says Brown. "They need to understand what’s important. Just because something has a discount attached to it, doesn’t mean that that they need to buy it."
Brown advised consumers to be extra careful if they were already over-indebted.
"If people are over-indebted, then they should really be spending their money on getting rid of their debt, rather than getting into further debt," he says.
"So our biggest concern about the cookie jar being open at this time of the year is that people tend to be exhuberant about their spending, rather than taking the right decision and using that extra cash they put aside to nail down their debt while they’ve got that opportunity."
'We hope that Black Friday is not necessarily a bad Friday for South Africans' he adds.
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