The Autopsy of Black Friday

Black Friday did not merely teach people to buy more. It taught them what buying is supposed to feel like. That emotion, not the transaction, is the product that survived. You can watch the discounts decay and the ritual remain intact. That is always the tell.

There’s an old story people tell about the day after Thanksgiving, that it’s when retailers finally go “into the black,” as if capitalism itself needs one sacred Friday to put on a tux and clean its ledger. That story keeps one foot in reality. According to the National Retail Federation’s annual holiday sales reports, November and December still account for roughly one-fifth of all U.S. retail sales. And if you trace the government’s own data as visualized by USAFacts’ historical retail spending series, December has been the highest-spending retail month every year since the early 1990s.

In 2024 alone, Americans spent over six hundred billion dollars in December, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Monthly Retail Trade Report. On average, December clears the next-highest month by more than seventy billion dollars, year after year.

The spike is real.

But here’s where the story starts lying by omission: while total spending has exploded, December’s slice of the year has actually shrunk. Analysis from DataTrek Research on long-term seasonal retail trends shows December’s share drifting from more than eleven percent in the mid-1990s to under ten percent today. Black Friday didn’t concentrate spending. It normalized it. It stretched the season backward into October and forward into January, transforming a surge into an atmosphere.

Worse, the holiday quarter is no longer just a sales boom. It is financial infrastructure. Reuters has repeatedly reported how retailers now depend on Q4 to deliver a disproportionate share of annual profit, not merely revenue. Wall Street expects it. Earnings are forecast with it baked in. Financial results tracked by LSEG’s retail earnings outlook show Q4 delivering outsized profit growth even when revenue rises modestly. Miss the quarter and the stock reacts immediately. So when people repeat that Black Friday “saves the year,” what they really mean now is grimmer: it props up valuation. It does not rescue. It maintains life support.

That explains the money. It does not explain the ritual.

To understand the psychological surgery, you have to return to the doorbuster era, when Black Friday still lost money on purpose. The late 1990s and early 2000s were the age of real absurdity. Free media. Printer bundles. Rebates that could qualify as postgraduate suffering. Retail was not optimizing margins. It was installing behavior.

I stood in the cold in front of Best Buy at an hour that should only exist during hostage situations to buy a US Robotics 56k modem I did not need, did not want, and already owned. I wasn’t upgrading. I was winning. I waited not because I lacked internet, but because other people were waiting. I walked out with a duplicate device like a trophy from a war no one declared.

The object was irrelevant. The ache was the point. The story was the point.

Doorbusters were never about generosity. They were about association. They taught people that buying should feel like conquest, that scarcity should feel like destiny, and that waiting in line was proof of worth. Thanksgiving did not end until you were clutching coffee, praying inventory outlived you by minutes.

That phase worked. Almost too well.

Once the behavior was installed, the system quietly changed the rules. Retail did not need to give things away. It needed to appear to.

The modern Black Friday is not a discount festival. It is an illusion factory. A multi-year investigation by Which?, the U.K.’s consumer watchdog found that the overwhelming majority of Black Friday “deals” were no better than prices at other times of year. In the United States, WalletHub’s Black Friday pricing studies consistently show that many advertised discounts offer no meaningful savings at all. And WTOP News has shown how this illusion works in practice through its reporting on price anchoring and fabricated “original” prices.

The discount does not have to be real. It only has to feel real.

Which is why the culture surrounding the day matters more than the receipts.

Nobody asks if you needed it. They ask what you got. Nobody wants to know if it made sense. They want to know if you won. Shopping talk sounds less like adulthood and more like a combat log. You didn’t buy a screen. You “snagged” one. You didn’t make a purchase. You “beat the rush.” Language betrays the transformation.

When the ritual moved online, nothing changed except the tools. Sleeping bags became browser tabs. Lines became loading screens. Wristbands became one-time passwords. People now write scripts to refresh pages because speed replaced patience and automation replaced elbows. Scarcity was not solved by the internet. It was automated.

This is why disappointment never kills the tradition. Participation is the reward. You can miss the deal and still feel like you were at the event. You can walk away empty-handed and keep the story. Buying is no longer the payoff. Performance is.

Consumerism did not colonize people with price tags. It colonized them with emotion.

So when someone asks what you got, they are not asking about your possessions. They are asking how you did in the arena. They want to see medals. They want to know if you were fast enough, lucky enough, or desperate enough to count the season as a win.

Which brings us to capitalism’s accidental confession: Best Buy quietly became best buyer.

Not careful. Not discerning. Not wise.

Fast. Hungry. Proud of the wound.

A competitor masquerading as a customer. An achievement system with feelings.

Black Friday did not normalize shopping. It redesigned it.

It taught an entire culture what consumption should feel like.

And once that feeling was installed, the machinery was free to change. The gifts could shrink. The discounts could become fiction. The lines could disappear.

None of it mattered.

The ritual stayed.

And so did the hunger.

Side Note: What did you get for Black Friday/Cyber Monday this year? Me, I got a new PS5 controller.