Black Friday PSA

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln set apart “the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” It was a day meant for counting what you already had. His proclamation lists blessings “so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come.”

Department stores built Black Friday, the high holiday of consumerism, atop that ethos. Gimbels in Philadelphia held the first store parade on Thanksgiving in 1920. It ended with Santa Claus opening the Christmas shopping season. Macy’s followed in 1924 with its own “Christmas Parade.”

In 1939, November had five Thursdays, which meant there was only a short run from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Fred Lazarus Jr., then head of Federated Department Stores (later Macy’s, Inc.), urged President Roosevelt to move the holiday a week earlier. Roosevelt obliged and moved it to the 23rd.

According to the National Archives, “the principal impetus was economic, the appeal of a longer Christmas shopping season to retailers.” Congress voted to permanently change Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November in 1941. It has not fallen after the 28th since.

The “Black Friday” name came later. Its earliest known use was in a 1951 trade magazine, complaining that factory workers called in sick the day after Thanksgiving. The name really began to stick after Philadelphia’s police used it to describe the shopper-induced traffic jams downtown.

The retailers hated it. In 1961, a city publicity official proposed calling it “Big Friday” instead. The new name never caught on. The story that stores go “into the black” that day doesn’t appear until the 1980s.

The name took on a darker meaning in 2008, when 2,000 shoppers broke through the doors of a Walmart on Long Island at its 5 a.m. opening and trampled a temporary worker, Jdimytai Damour, to death.

Over the next few years, stores began a race over who could open first to take advantage of the early traffic. In 2011, Walmart started its Black Friday sale at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving and Target planned a midnight opening that had staff starting work Thanksgiving night. A Target employee’s petition against the early opening titled “Tell Target to Save Thanksgiving,” drew nearly 200,000 signatures. Target opened early anyway. By 2013, it was opening at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, and in 2014, Kmart opened at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning.

In 2020, the pandemic closed most big stores on Thanksgiving, and Target has since made its closure permanent. The shopping has moved online. Last Thanksgiving Day, Americans spent a record $6.4 billion online.

The sale day has now become a season. Best Buy started its “DoorBOOsters” sale on October 30 and its Early Black Friday deals on November 6. Over Thanksgiving weekend last year, a record 203 million Americans shopped. Lincoln’s day for counting your blessings now sits in the middle of the year’s biggest sale.

Every promotion follows a simple rule: if it did not in some way benefit the company, it would not exist.

Loyalty programs are one clear example. Once a company knows you’ll keep coming back, it can charge you more. Last year, the Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler used California’s privacy law to get the data Starbucks held on him through his use of Starbucks Rewards. Two former FTC officials, Samuel Levine and Stephanie Nguyen, went through it. In months where Fowler bought more coffee, the app offered him fewer promotions. As he put it, if you get a half-price offer and he doesn’t, “you pay $2.50 and I pay $5.” The report also showed that Starbucks could share his data with 64 other companies, including data brokers.

Some companies turn your customer data into business lines of their own. Kroger’s annual report says that “over 95% of customer transactions are tethered to a Kroger loyalty card.” The data feeds what Kroger calls its alternative profit businesses, which include data analytics and advertising sold to the brands on its shelves. Last year, those businesses earned $1.5 billion in operating profit.

Black Friday is the biggest promotion of the year. It, like all the others, wouldn’t exist if it didn’t benefit the retailers and the brands.

That’s why I’m not taking part. Worse on Purpose will publish no deal roundup and no top picks list. My advice is to spend Thanksgiving with your family, and not to buy anything.

The earliest surviving account of the holiday, a 1621 letter from the Pilgrim Edward Winslow, perfectly encapsulates the original ethos:

As did the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, fifteen centuries earlier:

If you do shop this month, you should be aware of some common traps and scams, since they are especially prevalent now. Here are five of the most common ones, and how to avoid them.

The crossed-out price is what anchors the “% off” discount offer. Often, nobody has ever paid full price.

Consumers’ Checkbook tracked prices at 25 national retailers for 24 weeks in 2025. At 21 of them, the items it followed were on sale more than half of the time.

To check whether a discount is real, compare the sale price with what the item usually sells for. A class action filed against Amazon in September 2025 shows why. According to the complaint, a kids’ tablet listed at $119.99 sold on Prime Day for $72.18, advertised as “40% off.” Its median price over the previous 90 days was about $72. The Prime Day deal saved nothing. In April, it had sold for $50.

You can find real savings, but to do so you need to look beyond the crossed-out price. For Amazon, free tools like Keepa and camelcamelcamel provide price histories. Elsewhere, it can be more challenging, but make sure you at least compare prices for the same model number between stores.

Finally, check the price on a second device. The FTC found that pricing tools sold to retailers can use details like your location and your browsing history to set the price you see. You can easily check whether that is happening to you by checking the same product on a second device. In New York, a new state law requires a label whenever algorithmic prices that use your personal data are applied. It reads: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.”

Some products you see on offer during Black Friday are made specifically for the promotion. The industry calls these “derivative” models: versions of a familiar product with a slightly different model number, and sometimes a cheaper construction or fewer features. Derivative models are also often sold at budget retailers and outlets.

A different model number also prevents price matching. In 2015, Jim Wilcox, a Consumer Reports editor, told NBC News that “almost all of these price-match offers are limited to the exact same model.” Best Buy’s policy states that a product “must be a matching brand, model number and color to qualify.”

A derivative still can be a good buy. When Consumer Reports tests these TVs, Wilcox said they often “test very similarly to the regular model, so these can be great deals.” The problem is, it is difficult to tell which derivatives are good and which have been cheapened.

My advice is to check the model number and avoid derivatives altogether. If a deal for a derivative model is too good to pass up, try to find independent reviews of that specific derivative online. If you can’t, then buy at your own risk, and know that you are buying a discounted product, without knowing how it has been cheapened relative to the original.

Countdown timers and “ends tonight” messaging exploit innate behavioral patterns and push us to impulsively make purchases that we wouldn’t otherwise make. In 2019, Princeton researchers crawled around 11,000 shopping sites and found that 4 in 10 of the counters they uncovered were entirely fake. When time ran out, the clock simply started over, or the offer was still available regardless.

The urgency works, whether or not the deadline is real. Meng Zhu, a marketing professor at Johns Hopkins, tested this in a 2018 study with two colleagues. People picked tasks that paid less when those tasks came with a short deadline, even one they had plenty of time to meet. Zhu called the phenomenon “an illusion of expiration.” Beyond the countdown timers themselves, the whole Black Friday event produces an illusion of expiration, reinforcing the idea that any deal you see is “for a limited time only.” Know that the urgency you feel is rarely justified.

The retailers’ own policies undercut the rush. Best Buy says that “Most products purchased at Best Buy between Oct. 30 and Dec. 31 can be price matched through Jan. 15.” The guarantee covers only Best Buy’s own price. Still, if the price drops after you buy, you can claim the difference until the middle of January.

Buy from a store that guarantees its own price, keep the receipt, and check the price again before the guarantee runs out. If an unfamiliar site shows a countdown timer, leave.

I find the topic of consumer psychology fascinating and will write more about how companies exploit our neurocircuitry to sell us things. In the meantime, if you want to go deeper yourself, I have found Deceptive Patterns by Harry Brignull to be an impressive and illuminating body of work. It’s free to read.

You will get bombarded with offers on the last screen before you pay. Refuse all of them.

Store cards. Bankrate’s 2025 study put the average retail credit card APR at 30.14%, and 31.64% for cards that only work at one store. Many come with “no interest” promotions that are really deferred interest. If any balance is left when the promotion ends, interest is charged back to the purchase date on the full amount. For example, say you buy a $1,000 TV on a 12-month plan at 30.14%. You pay $80 a month and have $40 left at the deadline. About $169 of back interest lands on your bill at once.

Buy now, pay later. In a LendingTree survey, 47% of people who use these plans said they had made a late payment in the past year.

Protection plans. Checkbook says stores typically keep 40% to 60% of what they charge for extended warranties. Many credit cards extend the maker’s warranty for free, so check yours first.

Free trials. “Try it free to get this price” signs you up for a subscription that renews. In 2025, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC charges that it enrolled people in Prime without their consent and made canceling hard. Internal Amazon documents cited by the FTC include the line “subscription driving is a bit of a shady world.” Amazon did not admit wrongdoing.

Pay only with a debit card or a general purpose credit card that you clear in full each month. Decline the store card, the payment plan, the protection plan and the trial.

Three scams peak between now and Christmas.

Social media scam ads. Last year, more than 40% of the people who lost money to a social media scam told the FTC they “ordered something they saw in a social media ad.” Never buy directly from an ad. Beyond the fact that I encourage people to be skeptical of any brand that advertises incessantly on social media (since every dollar they spend on marketing is one less dollar they spend on product), fake social media ad scams are rampant. If you do want to buy a product promoted through an ad, type the store’s address in your browser yourself to ensure you are purchasing from the brand directly.

Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, you can dispute a charge for goods that never arrive.

The delivery text. Fake delivery notices, usually posing as the Postal Service, were the most reported text scam in the FTC’s latest breakdown, for 2024. Don’t tap the link. Check tracking at the retailer or carrier’s own website, and forward the scam text to 7726 (SPAM) to report it.

The drained gift card. Thieves record the numbers on gift cards still on the rack, put them back, and spend the balance as soon as someone loads it. Consumers’ Checkbook calls gift card draining “now a common crime.” Homeland Security Investigations runs a dedicated operation against it. Buy gift cards only when they are kept behind the counter, or straight from the brand’s own site. Check the packaging, and keep the receipt.

Every one of these traps depends on you shopping in a hurry. Each fix above takes a few minutes. If you do buy something this month, take a moment to reflect on whether this is a purchase you really need to make, or whether you are being swayed by false notions of urgency.

Better still, don’t shop at all. Thanksgiving was set apart as a day to give thanks for what we already have. Spend it with your family, eat some great food and let Black Friday pass.