Black Friday used to be ugly: Articles about people camping in parking lots on Thanksgiving night. Stories of retail workers being subject to abuse by rowdy customers. Videos of people elbowing and punching their way to a bargain on a new TV. Not a good look for capitalism.
Fortunately, things have changed. Now people don’t expect to see customers shoving each other on Black Friday. In fact, they don’t expect to see them at all. People can shop online, at a discount, from the comfort of their own homes. They also spread out their holiday shopping more than in the past, making the single day less important.
In other words, people are doing capitalism every day instead of taking Black Friday off. The Black Friday of yore was actually a one-day vacation from capitalism, a reminder of what life is like without prices and ordinary commerce.
Stores generally sold the products they marked down on Black Friday all year. But people didn’t break down the doors to buy those products. That’s because prices were set at the point where the product’s supply and people’s demand met. That’s how markets distribute products, with price signals telling buyers how much to get and sellers how much to make.
On Black Friday, the store would mark the product way down, wrecking the price signal. Stores would communicate to customers that there was a limited supply, so they better show up in the wee hours to get it. That meant a lot more customers would want a desirable product at the same time, inviting the ensuing chaos.
When people resort to violence in the absence of a price signal, they are reverting to how wealth was acquired before mass consumer capitalism.
For most of human history, the best way to acquire wealth was to kill the people. There was so little wealth that most people couldn’t ever expect to have much of it. The masses toiled on subsistence farms while a handful of aristocrats launched wars to conquer land and treasure.
Then came industrialization. Workers made more productive by new inventions had disposable income for the first time. New markets sprang into being, and ordinary people got a lot richer. The already rich became superrich. Unlike before, though, wealth wasn’t acquired primarily by taking it. It was created by making other people better off.
Too many Americans take it for granted that the U.S. retail sector peacefully distributes over $7 trillion of stuff to hundreds of millions of people each year. That’s more than the entire world’s economic output in 1920. (Amazon, founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, is the world’s largest online retailer.)
Black Friday didn’t become less vulgar from less capitalism. It got better because people have figured out that markets provide better ways to get holiday deals. Last year’s sales were the highest on record, and they’re projected to keep rising.
Black Friday is becoming just another unexceptional day when the most productive economy in the history of the world cranks out billions of dollars’ worth of stuff that people need and want, with the expectation that it will continue to come up with new things people didn’t even know they needed or wanted in the future. That’s worth celebrating.
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