When I was 11 years old, myself, my closest cousin, our grandmother, and her mother all lined up outside Martha Berry Square Mall at 3:30 a.m. to catch the Justice 75% off sale the company was holding. The entire store, whole outfits, and all the sequins we could dream of for a few dollars apiece.

This year, I stayed in. I didn’t go shopping, avoided any plazas, and kept my wallet closed. Cyber Monday came and went, and yet not a dollar was spent. That’s because the Black Friday I remember does not exist anymore. 

Target advertised 25% off TVs, 50% off Keurigs and accessories, and some arbitrary amount off on countless household items. Amazon plastered the shopping site with discount tags and Best Buy’s doorbusters included a $300 vacuum cleaner. 

I’m not the only one. As a long-time retail employee, I have been on the other side of the counter the past four years, as an eye witness to the steady decline of foot traffic on what’s supposed to be the biggest shopping day of the year.

So what happened? 

Price hikes. Lies. Consumer deception. Inflation. Stagnant wages. In an economy where more than half the population is one medical episode away from homelessness, companies have found a way to suck dry the last dollar, penny, and spirit from the holiday season. 

ITmagination, an engineering consulting firm, performed an analysis on the 2020 Black Friday price trends. In it, they kept track of the prices of different electronics and appliances over the 90-day period leading up to Black Friday. 

“The discrepancy between prices grows when we consider the preceding 90-day period, where prices were higher by an average of over 8% during Black Friday 2020 than the minimum price in the preceding 90 days,” they found.

What we’re seeing is a steady increase in prices in the days leading up to these big sale days, only for them to be cut back down to the original, already-too-expensive price that falls largely out of the average American’s household budget. 

In 2013, Barnes and Noble sold their NookHD for $79, ‘buy one, get one $10’ on classic editions. A 2014 Walmart ad advertised $25 dollar hardshell luggage, $50 Brother sewing machines, and 6 a.m. Friday deals for 30% Samsung and ‘Dollars off Diamonds’. 

KnownHost Blog conducted their own study on a variety of products leading up to Black Friday 2023. They found, “29% of products hiked their prices in the week before Black Friday, the average percentage change of the hike being a 20.5% increase, before dropping on the sale. These price hikes increased prices by an average of $51.”

Electronics seemed to be the most common item hiked, with Amazon Fire Sticks increasing 100%, from $20 to $40, and then being discounted back down to $20 for Black Friday.  

Consumers are catching on to these practices. A viral TikTok video posted by @Inquisitive_Nature showed the overflowing stock of TVs at BestBuy following Black Friday, where it is obvious the company expected their sales to really hit with consumers, but were faced with a harsh reality: most Americans already own a TV.

@TheFlyBohemian5 on TikTok went around Target, peeking at the typical signs hiding underneath the Black Friday marketed sale signs, seeing how the price was the same on both, and Black Friday sales were no different than typical discounts. 

“Industry experts unanimously agree that finding favorable offers requires in-depth market research using price history comparison websites as well as portals and discussion forums, where users who are focused on specific product groups inform each other about shopping opportunities, and our analysis added to the consensus,” writes ITmagination. 

But no one has time for price history research in the days leading up to Black Friday, with Thanksgiving right before. Companies are depending on the maintenance of the old, romantic Black Friday scene where consumers busted down doors at 5 a.m. without delivering discounts worthy of that rush. 

It’s a failing experiment, like Grey Thursday was for a time, where sales would start early the day of Thanksgiving, which received scathing feedback from workers who wished to spend the day with their families. The corporate oligarchy, this reality, that we live in as a consumer is to be a guinea pig for scams and ripoffs as CEOs learn how to push boundaries and profit margins in opposite directions. 

So how do you fight it? How does one push back on the corporate hold on consumers? (If you spend money, whether it be groceries for your household, games for your console, or coffee for your mornings, you are a consumer, and that hold is on you.) Stop buying. 

Instead of shopping on Black Friday, participate in Small Business Saturday, and make it everyday.  There is no escaping from the maniacal capitalistic society, no boycott will ever truly work when there are only 11 companies controlling everything we buy. But small micro-actions, planting little seeds, doing our individual part, can spread like wildfire as our generation enters the forefront of consumers.