The moment comes when the metal gates creak upwards. A massive crowd of barely functioning people swarming into the big box stores of America. The throng of people, jostling each other for a chance to buy, to find the the Thing That They Need. Fights break out, store workers are even trampled, gunshots ring out in Walmart parking lots. Black Friday feels like a yearly violent ritual livestream where the systemic antagonisms of capitalism is made street level and person-to-person.
America is capitalist to its core; a cult-like belief in its power to determine our lives. It appears omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Black Friday is like a day of monetary sacrifice, atonement for not spending; a self-flagellation but you buy a flatscreen TV instead. It’s not Thanksgiving or Christmas or the Fourth of July, but Black Friday that is America’s true holiday. The day where over 100 million people truly give thanks and worship at the altar of their actual gods. Christmas is a day of receiving stuff, Black Friday is the penance we must pay in advance for it.
Violence on Black Friday is a spectacle, part of the fun for the viewers at home. There’s a vicarious pleasure in watching shoppers fight each other for pots and pans, the same carnal bloodlust we get from seeing a hyena tear apart a sickly antelope or an MMA fight between 2 equally terrible opponents. The violent crime rate in America is going down, but our anxiety, frustrations, and precariousness have rarely been higher. “Everything is getting better!”, the Steven Pinkers of the World rejoice, and we remind them they’re on the Epstein flight logs and Uber drivers have to sleep in their offices personal cars.
Black Friday has an aura around it, given its own special name and status. Like most American holidays, it has a dark past plastered over. The term was coined by Philadelphia cops to mark the disruptive traffic and huge shopping crowds, but also reminiscent of the various “Black” days of economic destruction. Black Thursday in 1929 or Black Monday in 1987. Those single days of terrible economic news are over. Much like climate change, our economic crises move in slow motion, taking months or years to explode into full-blown meltdowns. Black Friday is a singularly destructive day mainly for our mental, spiritual and even physical health. Also like capitalism’s many crises, it too has a cycle.
Big Deal
The allure of the day comes from the numbers. Spending, money, the circulation of commodities is the main way we are allowed to express ourselves in America. What do you buy, what streaming services are you signed up for, what music do you listen to on Spotify. What’s in your house. What are you driving. Our lives are ruled by numbers on screens, on pages, representations of things we do or do not have. It’s a type of holography, things are just virtual representations of other things, just like how the products we’re supposed to buy are images of a lifestyle.
Black Friday ads have numbers, words, and products in them. They all look identical, highly compressed documents with endless images of stuff (rarely people). Disembodied goods on a page, being sold by no one in particular.
The most prominent word is “Save”. Save money, save your soul. The numbers are lower than they were before, and there’s a hoarding instinct in our lizard brains that makes us like saving money. The trick is that we’re being convinced to spend money, but we accept it because it’s less money than we would have possibly spent. You didn’t save money, you were tricked into spending it in the first place.
Never mind the game is rigged. Often prices are artificially raised slightly before the day to show steeper discounts, or products are specifically manufactured at lower quality just to be sold on Black Friday. The American obsession with deals is as old as our manufactured history. Remember the myth of Manhattan being bought for $24 worth of crap? What a deal! Our President is President Deals, and just like his various shitty dumb-guy scams, over 100 million will fall for the scam of Black Friday.
People just gotta get those deals, they’re running out of time, they need to feel like they won some of victory over the world. They need it, in lives so lacking in control and structure, at least at Best Buy they know they “won” just a little bit. The singular day focuses their attention and smashes them into their fellow citizen, jockeying for The Thing They Need. What’s fascinating about Black Friday is that people choose to be there, even though they hate it. They could just stay home, but those deals.
But the Tragedy in Alabama Aside…
I would like to present to you the single best piece of reporting on Black Friday, courtesy of ABC News last year:
Blink and you’ll miss it. At 1:05, there’s a mention of a shooting at an Alabama mall a few days before. Did you catch that a 12 year old girl was shot? (Factual correction, she was not killed.) What the snippet failed to mention was Emantic Bradford, a black legal gun owner, was also shot and killed by the police who thought he was the gunman (he was not).
After dispelling the myth of the “good guy with a gun”, we also get racist American state violence piled on top. The phrase “Black Friday” even inadvertently associates the color of someone’s skin with pain, loss, and death. But immediately after, back to happy shoppers, happy faces, long lines; an act of false community and togetherness.
The highest death tolls in human crushes or stampedes happen during religious or sporting events. Although the American death toll for tramplings is relatively low (a statement worth examining all on its own), the most popular image of Black Friday is the storming crowd of shoppers and the desperate clutching of stuff.
Workers at these stores suffer the worst of the onslaught. It’s typically described as a hellish day of constant stress, loathed throughout the year. They endure verbal and even physical abuse from customers, enraged and entitled at these lowly peons.In the same video I posted above, at around :45, a Victoria’s Secret worker has to literally climb a table to avoid being crushed.
The War of Everyday Life
A society chooses a holiday because it serves collective values. Thanksgiving and Christmas are a type of false holiday because American capitalism, our social atmosphere, is not about being thankful or giving without return. It is about the relentless accumulation of wealth. The day after we are supposedly honoring what we have, million go out in droves seeking more. We can engage in charity or gratitude on an interpersonal level, but any social attempts to do this in our commerce will naturally ring empty.
The competition and fight of daily life has been turned into an annual spectator sport crystallized with Black Friday. Their anxieties and stress are made real in the battle to save money. We have to fight each other quietly everyday to not being fired, to advance, to invent the new app, to get a modest raise. We are always placed in this arena in our daily lives without our consent. Black Friday offers a type of ritual capitalist combat.
Now we are placed in the bizarre position of being both witnesses to carnivorous greed at street level, but also virtual greed. The war now is for the best deal. We get endless internet content of vapid idiots bragging about their hauls and their deals, their gadgets, their secrets that help you save so much money. They’re not even our deals, they’re someone else’s stuff and we just get to experience the pleasure of watching them open boxes. It’s a type of consumerist pornography.
In the days after 9/11, President Bush urged Americans to go shopping in the wake of watching 3,000 people publicly executed, soon after he declared the invasion of Afghanistan (a war that continues to this day). One war to fund another. The consumer economy cannot be stopped by the qualms of self-reflection or national grief. We get war abroad and war at home, with each other, in our everyday lives, culminating in the great Battle of Your local Wal-Mart.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.