Black Friday Used to Be a Friday
The bargain hunt once meant newspaper circulars, a shopping list, and a line outside the store. Now the line has moved onto the calendar.
The Thanksgiving newspaper landed on the kitchen table with enough store circulars to qualify as a second newspaper. Somebody spread them out between the dinner dishes, found a pen, and circled a television. Then came the important part: checking what time the store opened and deciding whether that television was worth standing outside for.
You could see the whole plan on the table. Store. Price. Opening time. Possibly a backup store if the first one ran out. The newspaper got ink on your fingers, the store line was cold, and the person ahead of you might be there for the same television. None of this was especially pleasant. But the assignment was clear.
Now Black Friday takes some scheduling.
There’s an early sale, then another sale closer to the actual Friday, then Cyber Monday after that. A retailer’s holiday sale calendar can lay out separate shopping periods, online start times, and a head start for members. The newspaper used to tell you when to show up. Now you may need to check which version of the sale you’ve shown up for.
And what happened to the circled television? It’s still a television. Finding the deal is the project. You look at the advertised price, check when it applies, and see whether the offer you want starts online before it starts in the store. If members get first access, you also get to consider whether you want to join something to buy a television. That would have been a strange conversation to have over the old circular.
The old way had its own ridiculous moments. People stood in line before dawn to save money on appliances, which is not a sentence that makes humanity look particularly sensible. A store could run out before you got through the door. Nobody needs to pretend the freezing sidewalk was a treasured holiday tradition.
Shopping from home is better in some obvious ways. You can check prices without driving across town. You can skip the cold line. You can sit in a chair wearing slippers while making a decision that once required shoes and a winter coat.
But the line hasn’t entirely disappeared. It’s spread out. Instead of waiting for the doors to open, you watch for a sale to begin, wonder if the better price comes later, and try to remember which event you meant to shop. The old circular was a mess on the table. The new one can take up several weeks of your calendar.
Black Friday used to ask you to get up early. Now it asks you to keep track of when Friday is.
The conversation
Have a thought? Add it below. Comments are reviewed before they appear.
