Every year, the day after Thanksgiving is claimed by the beginning of Christmas. Black Friday, a day when stores across America are known to drastically reduce prices in the name of the season, is to blame for this.
It gets everyone excited for Christmas morning to give and receive, and all thanks to Black Friday, at a discount!
This term comes from the 1800s and pertains to “financial panics and economic downturns,” which obviously had and kept a negative connotation up until around the 1980s, where it took on a new, celebratory connotation.
In past years, crazed customers would give an arm and a leg for a Black Friday sale, literally. Many cases of broken limbs, other injuries, and even deaths are consequential to this American tradition.
For example, in New York in 2008, a Black Friday shopping crowd not only left shattered glass remnants of the doors to a shopping center, but a 34-year-old trampled to death.
However, the rise of online shopping has made way for Cyber Monday. Similar to Black Friday, Cyber Monday brings hundreds of deals for potential Christmas gifts, but what does this mean for the demand of such sales?
People used to be excited for the Friday after Thanksgiving to buy things at a reduced price, but now with so much access to online shopping, it is easier to scope the scenery for the best price possible. Unfortunately, this means stores whose main goal is to mass produce trendy clothing and items, like Shein or Amazon, receive more attention than these sales.
To expand, in today’s world, you don’t need to wait for a sale to find something for a cheap price; you can take a screenshot, put it into Google search, and find a “dupe”.
Not to mention, sales are not as drastic as they used to be. If we take a step back and look at a sale from 2010, GAP had a guaranteed 50 percent off if you shopped in-store on Black Friday. But if we look forward to today, all of the best sales are online-oriented with the full intention of extending the traditional shopping from one day to many days. This takes away the importance of retail jobs, the value of the physical dollar, but also the stress of facing dangerous traffic and reckless shopping cart maneuvers.
With the coming years, this decline in popularity of black friday may increase with the rates of social anxiety and technology access, or it may resurface with the need for price reductions as inflation continues to surge. At the end of the day, these sales are not worth a broken limb, much less a life.