Black Friday is my favorite holiday. It may not have the Thanksgiving turkey or the Fourth of July fireworks, but it certainly has the patriotism. It’s the day when crowds riot in malls over half-off TVs and place order after order of clothes online. It’s a day to celebrate pure, unadulterated consumerism. I love it.
The retail term “Black Friday” actually originates from right here in Philadelphia. It was used in the ‘50s, by the police, to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when crowds flooded into the city in advance of a big annual football game. Shopping, as well as shoplifting, became a dreaded tradition for Philadelphian law enforcement. The term was later reinvented by retailers, as day stores managed to turn a profit, going from red (in debt) to black (profitable). This new myth, and the new connotation of the holiday, was in nationwide use by the mid-’80s.
Today’s Black Friday is nothing like the ‘50s Philly PD could have imagined. Consumers are given a thrilling countdown, thanks to countless commercials, emails, TikToks, and pop-up ads boasting about their upcoming blowout sales. Every online website is slow and laggy all week with customers; every size is sold out; every order offers you a discount to buy one more thing, just one more. The overload is present in physical stores as well—malls and their workers are exhausted managing the hordes of shoppers. If you’ve never experienced the King of Prussia mall during Black Friday, have you really lived?
In this short-lived apocalyptic landscape where the early bird gets the best deals and the only god is your credit card, it shouldn’t be hard to take a step back and ask: what are we doing? Consumerism isn’t new or limited to one weekend; in fact, overconsumption has become a massive problem thanks to the simplicity of online shopping and the influence of social media. Think about all the microtrends and fads we’ve seen fade in popularity after they had the entire internet obsessed: Stanleys, Labubus, and even fidget spinners way back in 2016. Just like short-form content on TikTok or Instagram, the internet has turned consumption into a constant flood of dopamine hits. Social media platforms like TikTok are largely to thank for the age of $750 SHEIN hauls and $500 Sephora sprees. We buy what’s viral, and we buy a lot of it. Black Friday is seemingly a band-aid excuse for this behavior, for one weekend and one weekend only!
Black Friday, as long as it has existed, is a symbol of capitalism in its purest form. It’s a national spectacle of consumption, where stores and shoppers alike participate in a ritualized frenzy that perfectly mirrors the state of society: overstimulated, impatient, and materialistic.
