Doorbusted: the Demise of Black Friday
Part 1 of The Death of Retail
Black Friday. It's a curious day, and one that I've got weirdly complicated feelings about. On the one hand, I've always felt like it was an American institution. It was a tradition that had always been there and it seemed like something that would always be there. On the other hand, I hated it every time I had to work it.
In case you're not aware of what Black Friday is, it is considered the biggest shopping day of the year here in the US. While it has spread to many other countries around the world in various forms, our Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and has traditionally been a day with massive sales and discounts on a multitude of retail goods. So if it's that important, why in the world is it kicking off a series called The Death of Retail? Well, I suppose that's what we're here for.
The Origin of Black Friday
If you search for the origin of the term "Black Friday" you're likely to find several explanations. The most common that I've heard, which also seems to have been colloquially accepted is that it is a term referring to the start of the season when American retailers start operating at a profit, often recorded in accounting ledgers using black ink. The idea behind this is that many retail companies essentially run at a loss — recorded in the ledgers using red ink, or simply being in the red — for the first ten or so months of the year before turning it around and making up for it during the holiday season. Is this true? I mean it seems a little farfetched to me, but I'm not a retail manager or a retail accountant. All I know is that this is what I've heard many times over the years from friends, family, teachers, television personalities, and more.
In 2005, Kevin Drum conducted an analysis of the media’s use of “Black Friday” and recorded his findings in an article for the magazine Washington Monthly (archived here):
On a related note, the first reference I found to the term "Black Friday" was in a World News Tonight segment by Dan Cordtz from November 26, 1982: "Some merchants label the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday because business today can mean the difference betweeen [sic] red ink and black on the ledgers."
The news media then went into silence on the subject until a Washington Post story dated November 20, 1987, which provided the following advice: "Do not shop next weekend (unless you're into S&M; or S&Ls;). The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year — store workers call it 'Black Friday.'"
This suggests that the phrase was invented by retail workers peering apprehensively out their windows at the post-holiday mobs waiting to shop. However, a story in the Post eight days later confirms that it is "the day when the surge of holiday buying — and profit — is supposed to put [retailers] into the black." But this same story also includes the following explanation: "'We call it Black Friday because it's the busiest shopping day of the year,' said Andria Tedesco, 19, who was waiting on customers at Bailey Banks & Biddle jewelry store."
Take your pick.
Another, origin story for the term comes out of Philadelphia, PA in the early 1950s. In their 2010 LA Times op-ed (archived here), Michael D'Antonio and John Gerzema recount the story:
The day was originally nicknamed Black Friday by police officers who dreaded the traffic jams, bumper thumping and misdemeanors that arise when so many people converge on shopping districts and malls.
Whatever the case, Black Friday has had an interesting history over the last 70 or so years. While it is still a big deal for online and physical retailers alike, its significance in the American experience has definitely waned. But why? What happened? That is what we’re going to try and unpack.
The Decline of Black Friday?
Let me be perfectly clear. The decline of Black Friday does not mean there has been a decline in revenue for retailers. While the data leaves much to be desired in terms of raw sales numbers year-by-year, the data we do have shows a clear upward trajectory. According to Oberlo — a drop shipping company that featured this nice little chart sourced from Adobe Analytics — Black Friday spending has multiplied nearly tenfold from 2013 through 2023, and is projected to complete that jump in 2024.
So what’s the deal? If record profits are being recorded year-on-year, then why is Black Friday dying?
If we look instead at the total holiday sales over the last 20 or so years, we find the 2013-2023 Black Friday trend is pretty proportional to what we see overall for the entire holiday season. It’s not a perfect science, but generally we could extrapolate that out and assume the missing Black Friday sales numbers before 2013 would probably be proportional (approximately 0.5%-1.1%) to the sales of the latter years.
Of course, if we do the leg work to adjust all of those figures for today’s inflation the chart levels out a fair bit, meaning the statisticians are either lazy or they’re advertisers lying about being statisticians.
There has been an increase in holiday sales, but the growth isn’t nearly as drastic or substantial as the initial numbers lead us to believe. This means that based on the buying power of our money, we aren’t really spending that much more now than we did 20 years ago. Also, when we take into account the increase in the adult population since then (approximately 342 million today opposed to roughly 291 million in 2003) we might actually be spending less per capita.
But who cares about sales figures and charts? As I said at the beginning, the decline of Black Friday doesn’t refer to a decline in revenue for retailers. It’s about the death of the Black Friday experience. What does that experience look like? Let’s take a look.
The Cultural Representation of Black Friday
The idea of Black Friday being an insane rush of humanity who are willing to fight each other for whatever commodities are up for grabs has been a thing for decades, and for good reason. There are tons of stories out there about things like massive fights breaking out over $2 waffle irons, customers brawling over shoes, and even stabbings over parking spaces! Most recently was the 2021 Casey Tebo zombie horror, dark comedy, Black Friday where the staff of a big box retailer have to try and survive a hoard of zombified customers. Perhaps a more wholesome example, however, would be the 1996 classic Jingle All the Way.
But what is Black Friday really like?
The Consumer Experience of Black Friday
I’ll be honest, I’m not a big shopper under normal circumstances. I’m also more of an introvert, so the idea of going out and being around tons of people in a high stress situation with a ton of noise is enough to make my brain want to melt out of my skull. I’ve been out two or three times over the years, but if I go it’s usually later in the day once the crowds (and the best deals) are already gone. However, I did go to the mall with my mom and grandma one year and it was insane! I want to say I was probably 7 or 8 at the time, but there were people everywhere and I thought I was going to get lost.
Still, for whatever reason, I get a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling when I think about the idea of Black Friday. Maybe that’s because I remember year after year some combination of my mom, grandma, and my aunts making plans to get up super early to go shopping while my grandpa and uncles sat around watching whatever football game was on making it a nostalgic part of the holidays?
So, since I lack firsthand knowledge of what Black Friday shopping was really like, let’s see what we can find on r/AskReddit.
“i was 5 and saw a cute pair of slippers i liked and i was going to ask my mom to get them for me and some older lady came and started playing tug a war with me trying to take the slippers from me.” — u/deleteduser
“When Circuit City was still around I went in line about 4am (opens at 6) and it was a well regulated line. They had extra security to make sure no one was cutting in and did their job really well because there were a few that tried. I learned that I should go in and out as fast as I can, otherwise I'll be stuck in a long long time to check out.
Inside, I saw a bin of DVDs on sale but didn't see the ones I wanted and didn't want make a big mess so I walked around and grabbed the other things I wanted first then circled back. I figured after a few minutes someone is gonna go nuts and throw them on the floor to dig out the one they wanted and sure enough I saw two people digging into the DVD bin and leave a huge mess on the floor. I saw the ones I wanted and grabbed them and checked out within a few minutes.
While waiting to check out, I noticed others shopping around and I could tell they were scalpers. They were buying 3/4 external hard drives that were on sale, but the funny thing was it was 1 per customer/per household.” — u/blitzer1069
The Retail and Service Experience of Black Friday
While I am not a Black Friday shopper, I have had my fair share of working the day. I was never really in retail, but I worked at Starbucks for about 7 years and worked the morning rush every single Black Friday. It was absolute madness with lines out the door and around the corner. Drive thru customers were backed up out of the parking lot and down the main road as the ravenous hoards came in for their fix. Gone were the kind, cheerful, and generous customers we had seen the day before. They’d become agitated and irritable… well, at least some of them.
Truth be told, my experiences working Black Friday weren’t usually horrible. We always had our top workers scheduled for the morning rush because we needed all hands on deck to try to keep up. It was just that busy, and so eventually you just get tired. Thankfully, it’s just coffee and while it would be busy all day, it wasn't consistently busy all day. Eventually it settled down enough to breathe. Others, unfortunately, weren’t always so lucky.
“Worked security at a target once. Got a knife pulled on me in the women’s underwear section” — u/UrBrotherJoe
“The horror one year, for me, was checking out every customer with a door-buster items and trying to attach protection and branded payments to $200 laptops.
That was 14 years ago. The anxiety still lives.” — u/zeemonster424
“I had a customer interrupt a sale I was making on a PC bundle with protection plan. I kindly advised him I'd help him check next for any leftover $183.99 eMachines laptops. I turned back around to my original customer, when from behind, the 2nd customer picked me up off my feet and set me in front of the demo eMachine. He was promptly asked to leave the store.” — u/cwablue
“I worked a 14 hour shift my first Black Friday, it was a horrid experience I would wish on almost nobody. The first hour we had our building capacity with about an entire army of pissy people waiting for people to leave trying to push through our AP. Then i was released from my bonds at the front registers and sent to help our ware house after a fridge fell on one of our employees due to a fight between two customers over whatever console had just released. Fast forward a few hours of trying to tell customers they can't fit a 98" TV in a Honda civic or similar sized sedan or small suv, and I was finally sent to PC where I was originally supposed to be for my last two hours of my original 8 hour shift. Then we had a replacement employee get into a car accident which left us with a lack of sales people......me being a broke ass peasant I offered to stay I should have left when I could....for the rest of the time I stayed I was covering AP and receipt checking as I was cross trained everywhere. I got tackled by 6 or 7 people who where trying to push their way up front every 5 seconds and constantly thrown left or right by even more people the ran over by old ladies in a rascal.” — u/ShadowDemon527
Others weren’t so bad, or were even pretty funny.
“BF actually wasn't that bad for me but some guests figured out how to connect their phones to the speakers and there was moaning and fart noises for like 30 mins straight,,, sometimes people do it daily now” — u/sucharoyalpain
“Here’s a funny one for you not about customers. Back in the day when line got really long. I was line selling BPs, GSP,and services at the beginning of my shift. I got crapped on by a bunch of birds and the GM wouldn’t let go home to shower and change shirts. (Lived 5 minutes from the store.) I had to wash off in the bathroom sink. We didn’t have extra shirts because of all the seasonal they hired. Worked a 12 hours shift like that.” — u/HankHill-PropaneKing
A Changing Paradigm
As the years have gone by, the way people interact with Black Friday has changed drastically. In the late 90s, it wouldn’t be surprising to see news reports of 1,000+ crowds barging into big box stores at the crack of dawn…
The Rise of Cyber Monday
Then, in 2005, a new player entered the game. Cyber Monday allegedly began as a result of people taking advantage of the e-commerce revolution using the higher-speed broadband internet at their work on Monday morning during a time when many people still had slower internet at home. Regardless of whether that’s accurate or not, it has become a juggernaut in the world of retail. According to Wake Forrest University economics professor Tin Cheuk Leung, Cyber Monday has seen 20-30% year-on-year growth since 2016 overtaking Black Friday as the largest spending day in the US.
The Worst Black Friday
Then, there was 2008. It was already a difficult time for America — nay, the world. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and the broader housing market sunk the economy into one of the worst recessions in our history and shook the global economies along with it. With the collapse just two months removed, tensions were already high. Black Friday 2008 saw the usual chaos and agitation reach new heights when shoppers who were already preparing for a difficult road ahead came out to get the best deals they could for their families that Christmas season.
It was that morning, at a Long Island Walmart when 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour — a seasonal Walmart employee — was trampled to death by the incoming rush of customers who chose not to help him up when he was knocked to the ground. Several others were injured in the mayhem, but the tragedy led to the store closing shortly thereafter while some customers refused to leave until they were allowed to pay for their items.
That same day at a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California, two men shot and killed one another after an altercation between their presumed wives at the register.
The Rise of Gray Thursday
As time went on, stores would open earlier and earlier, eventually jumping the gun and opening on the evening of Thanksgiving itself; dubbing it Gray Thursday, or Black Thursday. Some people loved it, others hated it. Regardless, consumers ate it up and undoubtedly led to higher sales in the long run.
Retail Ghost Towns
Fast forward to today, and so much has changed. The once vibrant crowds are staying home and those who are going out are finding it easier and easier to get what they’re looking for. I would argue that with more and more retailers extending their Black Friday deals for entire weeks or more — and online retailers like Amazon offering their own extended sales—, it’s safe to say that the event known as Black Friday is dead.
Like many other areas of life, Covid fears, lockdowns, and restrictions drastically changed the way people shopped. Online shopping exploded during the pandemic and curbside pickup became much more widespread leading to a decline in foot traffic in brick and mortar stores. Alison Fromme, writing for Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business explained it well, citing assistant professor of marketing Nathan Yang:
“In the past, retailers used Black Friday sales as a tool for inventory management,” Yang said. “They needed to clear out the excess to make space for new products. They offered incredible deals – a $10 flat screen TV, for example, but only stocked a few. The point was to get people into the store to buy other, more expensive items.
“The pandemic changed Black Friday,” Yang said. “Retailers suffered financially when supply chain issues affected product availability, so they responded by becoming more agile regarding inventory. This ensured that they avoided stocking too many or too few of any product. The effect today? Less excess inventory to try to offload during the holiday shopping season.”
Covid also changed people’s expectations about use of space.
“Even if there’s less foot traffic in a particular retail store, people might actually end up spending more because they feel like they have space to shop around,” Yang said. “Covid made retailers very averse to creating situations of crowdedness, which is basically a negative customer experience factor.”
Advancements in technology used by retailers and advertisers has also played a major role in the decline of the Black Friday experience. Fromme continues:
Retailers have also shifted to more personalized marketing strategies. Instead of general sales, companies now reward their loyal account-holding customers with early discounts not available to the general public.
Retailers are increasingly using sales data and algorithms to identify the customers likely to have the highest value to a company – a measurement known as “customer lifetime value,” or CLV. Using this metric, retailers optimize their marketing efforts towards high-value, returning customers. The biggest retailers have their own data science teams devoted to this type of analysis, while smaller retailers use off-the-shelf or custom-built software for this purpose.
In other words, personalized marketing is more sophisticated and profitable compared to conventional discounts and promotions.
Since the pandemic, things have been slow to recover. In 2022 Reuters covered the dismal turnout at stores that had traditionally been overwhelmed with shoppers, showing that the lasting effects of covid lockdowns still remain. That coupled with seemingly misleading sales from retailers like Target in 2023 and our continual dependence on the internet and smart devices, makes online shopping more appealing to many would-be customers.
These days, there seems to be some recognition that things have changed and at least some people are starting to miss the in-person shopping.
Whatever your take on Black Friday, I think you’d agree with me that there was something charming about it as part of the holiday season. It was just part of what set the tone, for better or for worse. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, and I suppose it doesn’t really have to. All I know is that I’d much rather see ads like this…
than this…
Who knows what Black Friday will turn out to be this year, but I would suspect to see more of what we’ve seen the last several years. Nevertheless, cheers to the memories… and go check out some old Black Friday ads at the Black Friday Archive, or check out more Black Friday news coverage from years past to see the train wreck that we’ll likely never really see again.
In 1989 I was a computer operator for a retail chain. Every evening, the stores would dial in to upload the days data. It was basically everything that went through the cash registers.
If something sold a lot, it could trigger reorders for that store, etc. most important were the credit card records. They got written to a 9 track tape and FedEx'd to the card company. Except Visa, who should call up and we would send it over the modem.
Usually the tape had around 1 million $ on it. On the Friday night after thanksgiving, it was around 3 million. This was before stores had big sales the day after thanksgiving.
I think most retail chains were still mostly using postal mail for this kind of thing and there wer