A cruise down fifth avenue, with little to show for it

Nov 11's American cousin, Black Friday, has a few things to commend it, but one big failing

In Beijing, just as we were still wrestling with the polluted air of a miserable, gray Saturday, in the United States anyone interested was getting into the full swing of Black Friday.

Black Friday, in case you haven't heard, is a shopping festival that is the equivalent of the now famous Nov 11 Internet shopping extravaganza in China, and it seems, going by last Saturday, that a cyber version of the American event is as strong here as it is in the land of its birth.