Black Friday may be one of the most insane holidays out there. In movies and TV shows, Black Friday is depicted as this crazy, free for all, shopping spree where people camp outside of Best Buy and trample each other over for a discounted TV. People are shown pushing and shoving each other for the sake of saving some money and it’s kinda become this normalized, purge-like phenomenon that people just expect to happen every year.
But how accurate is this portrayal? Are people really willing to fight strangers in random retail stores over a sale on toothbrushes?
Well a couple years ago the answer would’ve been: Absolutely. In fact, tens of thousands of horror stories have been reported about people’s experiences with this holiday, including car crashes, store shoot-outs, attacks and more. The entire holiday was honestly just a really depressing representation of us as people.
But why did it all end? How come we don’t see this level of ferocity and aggression on Black Friday anymore? Why don’t we see people camping outside of department stores? Why don’t we see crowds of people storming stores and fighting over items the way we’ve become accustomed to after all these years. What happened to Black Friday…?
Well, before being deemed the official event that sets off the season of holiday shopping, the name Black Friday actually originated from the police of Philadelphia in the 1950s to describe how chaotic the day was. People would swarm the city for their annual Army-Navy football game and while they were there, they would crowd the stores and steal merchandise.
Since then, the story has been spun into a positive celebration to kick off the holiday season and that one day after Thanksgiving has since been transformed into a four-day long event, including Black Friday, Small Business Saturday/Sunday, and Cyber Monday. These additions kind of take away from Black Friday’s novelty by expanding it into this big thing and gives people more time to rush to stores and get good deals rather than having everyone storm a WalMart on one specific day.
With the addition of online shopping becoming an integral part of our everyday lives, no one really has any reason to leave their house for the sake of Black Friday when they can get those same deals online. They don’t have to camp outside of their favorite department store anymore when they can just order their items from the comfort of their own couch. In fact, Black Friday sales were as high as ever this year. The only difference is that most of the buying was done on Amazon rather than Best Buy.
What’s more is that with online shopping comes the over abundance of promo codes, offers, discounts and more. There always seems to be a reason for an item to be on sale. People don’t have to wait a whole year to save money on weird house appliances anymore.
So whether or not you’ve noticed in the past couple years, the craze that has surrounded Black Friday for the past couple decades has indeed been on a steady decline since the introduction of online shopping and all that comes with it. Though companies still try to push the holiday, for better or for worse, the event obviously isn’t what it used to be. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if in a decade or two, Black Friday won’t exist at all.
The death of Black Friday may have been a long time coming for a lot of us, but no matter whether or not you anticipated this day, one thing is for sure, it truly is the end of an era.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/business/what-is-black-friday.html
https://www.history.com/news/black-friday-thanksgiving-origins-history