For most of my life, Black Friday has been a bloodbath of libidinal consumerism. Every year, we turned housewives into gladiators, arguing and beating each other over discounted bath towels at JC Penny. Black Friday meant pulling a gun in a Toys “R” US, being trampled to death by a crowd of 2,000 at Walmart, or having an old-West-style shootout over a parking spot in Tallahassee. In 2008, someone even created the website “Black Friday Death Count.” Black Friday always meant many things: a rush of adrenaline, excitement, fear, anxiety, and rage.

But this morning I felt bored. It was 5:45 AM, 15 minutes before opening time, at my local Walmart. A dozen or so people waited by the doors. They looked bored. The scene at Target around 6 am was similar. When I went to Kohl’s, which was already open, it was no more or less busy than it was last Thursday, when I randomly wandered in to pick up a Brita filter. I saw no fights, no arguments, no running.

I wondered, is Black Friday dead?

Yes and no. According to the National Retail Federation, Black Friday is still the largest shopping day in America, with over 130 million people expected to buy in stores and online. (Cyber Monday, for all its good branding, still only attracts half the customers Black Friday does.) Online is key here. Last year, a whopping 47% of Black Friday purchases were made through people’s phones, and this year it's estimated that 2.5x more people will shop online for Black Friday deals than those shopping in person. As I write this (on Black Friday) Shopify’s live ticker today is recording an average of nearly 23,000 orders per minute, and Stripe’s is recording over 57,000 per minute (with Stripe recording nearly $5 billion in sales on their platform alone so far). To be sure, people are still shopping in stores — but not in the same way they used to. Retails have embraced the “Black Friday Creep” starting sales as early as the beginning of November. Many large retailers also now allow in-store pickup, so not all foot traffic — which is slightly up since the end of the pandemic — necessarily equals in-store purchases. The cumulative effect of all this is a Black Friday without “the rush”.

We can see this change reflected on “Black Friday Death Count” dot com too. Nearly every year until the late 2010s something insane happened because of “the rush,” a Black Friday flash sale in which both time and product were limited: multiple crowd-crush incidents, a shirtless man whipping sneakerheads with a belt outside of an Adidas store, off-duty cops pepper-spraying shoppers who were trying to grab items before workers could even put them on the shelves. However, In a real sign of the times, The Black Friday Death Count recorded no incidents from 2022, and all of the incidents from 2021 were either random shootings or robberies — crimes that could have happened any day of the year. General social decay is not the same as the madness of crowds that Black Friday used to create, something which the internet — and month-long sales — have taken away. 

So Black Friday isn’t dead, just longer and more digital.

Perhaps I’m a luddite, but there’s something sad about that. I remember fondly my mom and aunt sitting around with a newspaper after Thanksgiving, pen in hand, mapping out the Odyssey that they’d take at 4 am the next morning. One year, they were rushing into Target at some ungodly hour and my mom slipped and fell in her new shoes. My aunt abandoned her, yelling “Sorry!” as she rushed toward whatever it was she needed. My mom realized she had fallen because she had left the sales sticker at the bottom of her shoes, which she quickly ripped off as the Target manager rushed to her side with a liability waiver in hand.

“These floors are slick!”

“I’m so sorry ma’am. Just tell me what you need.”

My mom handed him the list and he darted off, getting her everything that she wanted, plus another 15% off, as she signed the paperwork promising not to sue.

Speeding to the mall at 4 am, just hours after celebrating a holiday where you’re supposed to be thankful for what you have, abandoning your sister at a Target, exploiting a slip and fall accident that was your own fault, this is America in its purest form. It's who we are as a people. Black Friday is the most American holiday there ever was, and it would be tragic if it just devolved into simple online shopping, something that the Dutch do just as easily.

The communal experience of Black Friday shopping, something families do together, cannot be replaced. One could run into old friends, create new enemies, and engage in hand-to-hand combat over a coffee maker if needed. All of these highs and lows are eliminated in a digital shopping cart that no one can steal from. Online shopping is fundamentally a solitary activity. At best, one seeks approval from their spouse before making a large purchase. Otherwise, it is nothing more than atomized phone-watching, nowadays a banal fixture of everyday life.

Luckily, lots of people are still shopping in person on Black Friday. Although no one was banging down the doors this morning, by 9 am, the mall near my house had lit up. It was nothing compared to the madness of Black Friday’s past, but it was certainly a busier shopping day than any other. People perused and shuffled along, they said “excuse me” when they bumped into each other, which didn’t happen too often. I only saw one line, at a UGG store, of all places, where Zoomer women (and one Twink) stood moodily in line vaping. I felt a bit of hope. Perhaps it's better this way. A busy shopping day without the bloodshed. More options for those who never craved the mad rush of barely beating a middle-aged woman to the last box of heavily discounted China at Kohl’s. That Black Friday is dead. Long live the New Black Friday.

–River Page