PANIC AT THE DISCO(UNT)
Black Friday, when thinking is dangerous.
It’s happening again.
The little tightening in my chest that comes every year around this time.
Still a week ‘til Black Friday, and already the email subject lines are screaming and the push notifications vibrate my phone across the table. Early access! Exclusive preview! Members only! It’s here!
21st century consumer culture is very good at manipulating our feelings…inadequacy, desire, anxiety. We’ve spoken a lot here about that. But at this time of year we see how good it is at manipulating time itself.
Black Friday isn’t just about shifting stock. It’s about shifting our perception of time.
Everything about it is designed to eliminate any potential pause for thought.
And its scale has become staggering. 62% of British people made a Black Friday purchase last year. Americans spent $41.1 billion (just online) across the few days of 2024’s Cyber Week. And this year’s predicted to be even bigger in the US and the UK.
That Black Friday continues to grow while wages stagnate and basic groceries become unaffordable for many [when “the consumer generally remains in such rough shape”, to quote J.Crew CEO Libby Wadle on stage at BoF Voices this morning] doesn’t make sense economically. But it does sociologically.
In some of his earliest work, behavioural economist Richard Thaler wrote about how when hope for the future dims, we tend to stop saving for it (he talks about present bias and mental accounting). When the big things feel out of reach, we tend to start saying yes to smaller, more attainable things. YOLO. Or the little treat culture that every mainstream media title seems to have written about over the past year or so.
Maybe Black Friday doesn’t thrive despite the economic precarity and pressure.
Perhaps it thrives because of it.
Getting a bargain feels like control. And control feels like safety. Even just for a lil bit.
But is all this urgency even real?
The rarer something seems, the more we tend to want it.
American social psychologist Dr. Jack Brehm was I think the first, in 1966, to connect the power of scarcity with our shopping behaviour - when something appears to be limited, we want it more, regardless of whether we actually need (or even like) it.
(this was made famous by Stephen Worchel’s 1975 Cookie Jar Experiment: cookies from a jar that was emptier, containing fewer cookies, were consistently considered to look tastier).
Black Friday industrialises and weaponises this stuff.
But are we racing against real scarcity or just a feeling of scarcity? Are the countdown timers counting down to anything real, or is it theatre…and you’re the audience?
Well, when consumer-rights protection group Which? ran a study examining Black Friday 2024 offers, 92% of the deals analysed were found to be available at the same price…or less…at other times of the preceding year. Ouch.
Black Friday used to be a domestic US commercial moment that served a very specific purpose: the day after Thanksgiving, retailers slashed prices on product lines they were keen to get rid of while shoppers were feeling spendy pre-Christmas.
But since around 2010, many counties inc. the UK (that doesn’t even celebrate Thanksgiving…I’m not convinced the typical Brit in the street/pub could explain exactly what Thanksgiving is) have imported the retail moment, but not the cultural context.
And what was once a 24-hour shopping frenzy has metastasised. November used to contain Black Friday. Now Black Friday contains November.
What does your Black Friday participation say about you?
By now our Black Friday participation has become its own form of status signalling…one that cuts both ways.
Bragging about your bargains says: I won. I beat the system. I’m financially astute and culturally literate. But it also suggests you’re susceptible to manufactured urgency, that you can be manipulated by countdown timers and CAPS LOCK subject lines.
But opting out also says: I won. I beat the system. I’m financially astute and culturally literate. Or maybe it says you’re privileged enough not to need to chase discounts. Or too virtuous to engage with such crass commercialism…above it all, somehow.
It’s a mess.
Especially on a human, and environmental, level. Someone is working mandatory overtime in a freezing warehouse picking and packing those orders, and someone is driving the delivery trucks through the night while we sit up in bed, authorising Paypals.
According to internal Amazon data released by a Senate investigation, during Prime Day 2019 (a comparable moment of artificially-concentrated retail frenzy), Amazon’s rate of warehouse injuries was more than double its average, many of the injuries cited as a result of overexertion - people’s bodies breaking down under the pace.
And it’s not just worker injuries that double. 2024 Black Friday order deliveries created a 94% jump on a typical week’s CO2 emissions.
And then there are returns. Last year consumer regret/buyer’s remorse led to a 143% surge in returns during the week after Black Friday weekend. With the environmental cost of returns being up to 30% higher than the initial delivery, businesses unwilling or unable to cover the costs of processing returns often direct send-backs straight to landfill. It’s cheaper to just write them off.
And then there are the retailers themselves. I work with retail leaders week in, week out, all year, and a lot of those I know approach Black Friday with trepidation, not excitement or greed.
A prisoner’s-dilemma-like feeling that they must join the dance, even when it doesn’t align with their brand’s positioning/values, even when they don’t really have the margin or the resources to spare, even if it kind of contradicts everything they’re trying to build around quality or ethics or brand integrity.
The dilemmas go something like this: “Deep discounts can erode hard-won brand equity, and this sort of thing isn’t really on brand for us. And we don’t have margin to give up, and we could use that marketing budget better elsewhere. But it’s a bigger risk not to participate. We might lose share. Which can’t happen, not right now. So let’s do it. But we need to do it better than our competitors.”
Which tends to mean: bigger discounts (that eat into precious/precarious margin), heavier promotional spend (that eats into operating profit), and increased urgency (going earlier, going louder, going more extreme/annoying/intrusive).
Black Friday has us all by the scruff of our necks.
It’s easy to say ‘just opt out!’. But at this point, and at this scale, I don’t think the panic and the FOMO are that easy for anyone - customers or brands - to simply opt out of, really.
The system needs us rushing. When conversion is the goal, consideration time is the enemy. This coming week will see basket/cart abandonment rates spike to their highest rate of the year. We mustn’t be allowed to stop and think.
On Black Friday, thinking is dangerous.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.
Beth
Oh Beth, I love your take on this stuff!! I especially thought it was interesting to think about what our participation (or lack thereof) says about us. I really struggle with Black Friday because of the way it turns off all my good shopping habits. And being on the creator side is a hard because I see the “missed opportunity” of promoting sales so I try to be very selective about my approach. Please don’t hear that as me having it figured out though 😉
Well said, Beth! Black Friday is an artificial buying frenzy that has reached a fever pitch and manipulation at its worst. I do believe we can avoid the impulse buying encouraged by the sales and use it to our advantage by knowing exactly what we actually need and buying it if a sale opportunity presents itself. Or buying necessities, you'll buy anyway in the future at a better price. I know a woman who makes a spreadsheet of all the things she continually buys, everything from skin care to dog food, and stocks up on Black Friday, from the comfort of her home, of course. Apologies from the US for exporting Black Friday to the UK!