Since 1980sBlack Friday marks the kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Stores offered near-impossible “doorbuster” deals on TVs and hand blenders, with shoppers rising before dawn to wait in line to get them. Violence ensuesAnd the tinsel-covered period when retailers finally operated “in the black” began in earnest.
It’s probably for the best, then, that Black Friday isn’t what it was 20 years ago. A movement to recognize its toll on retail workers eventually convinced many stores to close on Thanksgiving so workers could be with their families instead of stocking up for the busy day ahead. Holiday shopping The online move continues. And the thrill of a deep, one-day discount turned into a numbing, month-long flash sale, Cyber Monday specials, and member appreciation events.
Future Perfect Deputy Editor Izzy Ramirez reports extensively on the state of American consumerism, from the way we buy, use, and throw away literally tons of stuff each year to the quality of the things we buy—from appliances to undergarments. – Getting progressively worse.
I caught up with him to talk about why Americans’ shopping habits have changed Threat of higher tariffs Big-ticket products can mean money, and how sales bonanzas like Black Friday are part of retailers’ larger efforts to save our purchases, our own harm, and the planet. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Lavanya Ramanathan: So, the quality of our goods is poor now. Tell me a little bit about that, we’re looking at a period when Americans will buy a ton.
Izzy Ramirez: I want to say that everyone thinks I’m anti-shopping, and it’s not that I’m anti-shopping; I actually like shopping. Materialism is fun, materialism is fun, except when it isn’t
I started writing about this because I faced a problem, and the problem was that my brand new bra sucked. Shouldn’t new things be better? Isn’t that the full promise of capitalism?
I really wanted to get a mass-produced understanding of what’s going on, and talk a little bit about the decline in repairability and what we can do about it. Because I think people want to buy things that make them happy, that last and fit their lives. And it’s bad when you invest your money and you don’t get your money invested.
It’s less that companies want to make worse quality products. In the case of my bra, it’s more that for the cost of producing something like my bra, you can’t do the same thing for the same amount of money. Something has to give, and it’s going to be either labor or material quality, and it’s usually a little of both.
Knowing all this, what’s a good way to do something like Black Friday? There are all kinds of deals, like $50 for TVs. With some of this, is it just throwing good money after bad? Is there really a way for consumers to win?
I’m going to be a hypocrite with this one. I generally think Black Friday is bad, but if Trump enacts tariffs, maybe Black Friday will be good for larger purchases, like washing machines, dishwashers, and other large appliances, because the tariffs will create conditions for those globalized goods, where you way, Way, way more expensive, need parts from a billion different places. And if they’re not more expensive, they’re going to be items that go bad, very quickly.
This is bad advice in most situations. There is a lot of science and psychology behind buying things. On Black Friday, you feel like you don’t have time. This is completely false, because they regularly run the same sales. If you know anything about Black Friday, they have the same sales every year. It’s not that sales won’t happen anymore. Or the Sephora sale. It really grinds my gears when I see people posting Sephora hauls, like they’ll never get members sales again. They do it two or three times a year. It’s the scarcity mentality.
You also wrote about Hal. we are is Now shop differently. We shop online. It has become much easier to get things from all over the world. If I had to guess, I’d say there are more brands – direct-to-consumer sellers of things like jewelry What is shopping by itself?
Hauls are when people buy 10 or 15 or 20 different items at once and usually parade them around on social media. They buy things from places like Amazon, Temu, Shein, Abercrombie and Fitch. The thing about hal culture is that it creates that mentality around scarcity, like, “Oh, you need this.” It normalizes mass consumption, and buying many things at once and regularly and spending so much money is a regular habit.
And if you don’t spend that much money, you’re going to spend it at places like Shin’s that have $1 t-shirts and that normalizes a dangerously low price for workers and the planet.
A lot of the things you describe sound like new behavior. A thing is happening in our shopping ecosystem and in our consumer culture around the demand for new – always for new.
Yes, and I think a lot of it is driven by the normalization of excitement around buying — the dopamine shopping, wanting to feel something. A lot of it is social media, and a lot of it is the scale of globalization and all these new players that are in the market This is also a whole other level of consumer deception – this false sense of urgency from the company.
Yes, there is demand, but also companies know that they can take advantage of us this way. It is like the Ouroboros, the snake eating itself. It will never end unless we make a conscious choice to say no.
