The Enshittification Of Black Friday
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love paying full price.
Was Black Friday ever “fun”? From a distance the tailgate-like atmosphere of overnight lines in front of Best Buy did have their own quintessentially American charm, people coming together with their neighbors to share Thermoses of hot coffee and talk football yardage before all social bonds dissolved under the weight of flatscreen “door buster” deals. Now that I think about it, Black Friday does have a lot in common with football: both are indelibly woven into our national character, both incomprehensible to the European mind. Both are massive economic engines and inspire annual familial rituals. Also, any imagined social or moral currency gained by hating on either is nullified by the sheer volume of fandom for both. Resistance, as they say, is futile.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the impulse but in a culture swimming in late-stage capitalism critiques, Black Friday is too easy of a target. Yes, it’s soulless cash grab meant to juice Q4 numbers but it’s also 1/5 of retailers’ annual sales, directly supporting hundreds of thousands of seasonal jobs plus full-time textile and garment manufacturing positions, not to mention all the corporate-level positions in design, marketing, and production. Rather than just some shareholder value-increasing tumor that’s slowly metastasized on our beloved—if historically fraught—Thanksgiving holiday over recent decades, Black Friday’s roots can be traced back to the end of the Great Depression when FDR proclaimed in 1939 that the holiday should be celebrated on the second to last Thursday in November (it had been the final). This was to give retailers, who traditionally didn’t kick off the seasonal shopping blitz until after Thanksgiving, a head start. We bumped the national day of gratitude so we could shop more.
Besides, who doesn’t love a deal? Close readers of this Substack will notice regular references to my pecuniary values, which charitably could be described as “sensible,” although “cheap” probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark either. Coming from a line of thrifty New Englanders and spending your early career in publishing will do that to you. What was born out of necessity is now just the thrill of the hunt. My $1600 Norse Projects parka? Got it for $300 on Yoox after stalking end-of-season sales and eBay for years. The truth of it is that I’d never paid over five hundred dollars for any piece of clothing until I had The Armoury make my wedding suit. So I don’t begrudge anyone for shopping Black Friday, especially at a time of wage stagnation and cost of living increases.
Does all this mean I’ve been Bezos-pilled? Certainly not. I’m clear-eyed about that fact that Black Friday disadvantages small retailers and brands who can’t make up the discount hit to margins with volume and the fact that many of its “deals” are anything but. And that’s not even touching the environmental impact of a day (weekend? Week? Month?) dedicated to overconsumption.
So maybe Black Friday was never fun but it was perhaps communal or at the very least useful. You and your aunts would load up on towering Frappuccinos and wander the kitsched-out mall. Or your dad would strategize like a Roman general which stores had which toys so the family could get what they wanted and he could get out before the fist fights began. But this year felt different. First came the reports that brands were cutting back on Black Friday deals as the tariff impact on production made deep discounting impossible. When I tried to shop END’s Black Friday sale I was told that “customs regulations and recent tariff changes” meant the US was excluded, which I have to assume is their biggest market. Then came the news that 42 percent of shoppers are using AI to purchase their holiday gifts, which includes personalized gift finders and the ability to complete purchases—with select retailers—within the LLMs. That can’t be good news for independent stores and fans of the in-person retail experience. AI slop in your stocking? It’s coming.
As for the deals themselves, they were pretty meh across the board. 25 percent off seemed as low as many were willing to go, and even Cyber Monday didn’t yield “an additional X off.” Nonetheless, Americans spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, a record. At face value that sounds like good economic news, but digging into the numbers reveals a more complicated picture. According to an analysis by Newsweek, spending rose 3.1 percent, but volume only rose 0.2 percent. What that means is that people spent a lot without getting a lot, a result of inflation. More ominously, BNPL (buy now, pay later) spending on Cyber Monday alone topped $1 billion. From Newsweek:
Tracy Schuchart, a senior economist at NinjaTrader, called BNPL the “elephant in the room” of consumer spending, noting high levels of usage among high earners for discretionary purchases and among lower-income groups for essential items.
“The demographics explain why spending hit records while unit volumes declined,” she wrote on X on Saturday. “Younger shoppers financing purchases on mobile devices drove transaction counts. High earners financing luxury goods on BNPL drove dollar amounts. Lower income shoppers financing necessities kept participation rates high even as they bought fewer actual items.”
That tracks with the oft-cited figure that the top 10% of US earners currently account for nearly half of consumer spending. Pull back the veil on that record setting performance and you’ll find a Black Friday propped up by luxury spending on one end of the class spectrum and debt trap instant financing on the other. As Michael Williamspresciently wrote just before the holiday, “It feels like these sales have taken a turn towards the dark side.”
This is where I’m supposed to offer a solution, or at least a balm, but I don’t know that I have one. Michael laid out a very sensible three point plan for navigating Black Friday—all purchases really—so I’d suggest following that (same link as above). As for me, I can only tell you what I ended up doing on Black Friday—I paid full price. It ran counter to my congenital frugality, and my current finances, but I knew what I wanted, who I wanted to buy it from, and what it was worth, so I paid it. No scheming, no code stacking, no strategizing. In the process I experienced a feeling no deep discount had ever delivered before: liberation.
It’s bad and only getting worse. Every year I’m the first to say to my family, “can we just not?” We’re drowning in stuff. This is the fall of the republic. I did get a deal on some Labubu’s though.
Coming from the web side of things I should be all for BFCM, it's where I make most of my sales for the year, but I'm over it both from a consumer and a dealer. I'd rather have people buy what they need at a price they can afford and retailers need to adjust their margin in order to survive steadily through the year. We need to take advantage of the holidays to spend time away from work not stressing out.
I get caught up in the race and end up with shit I didn't want or need just because it was a good price. Although when you do get a deal on something that lasts with you forever it's the best feeling in the world. They come so infrequently though that it doesn't make sense in the long term.