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Black Friday is designed to lure consumers into spending as much as they can in the least amount of time possible. Through the promise of discounts, limited-time offers and the use of shady marketing to create a sense of urgency, Black Friday continues to scam shoppers year after year.
Oftentimes, discounts come with a fine print promising savings only after spending a certain amount. However, the minimum is typically more expensive than the cost of buying one individual item, pushing customers to spend more than intended for a discount that would not have been enough to cover the cost of the initial item in the first place.
In addition to spending double the money for a quarter of the price off, retailers today are often dishonest when it comes to the sale price in comparison to what products are worth. Items are often advertised as significantly more expensive than their market price. The inflated price is then crossed out, and the original true market value is written as a sale price.
According to CBS, this process is referred to as listing anchor prices, which create the illusion of a great deal when, in reality, customers are paying full price. Anchor prices and minimum spending requirements for receiving discounts are not the only things that contribute to the scam of Black Friday shopping.
Half of the Black Friday pressure comes from its image. The entire event has been designed to appeal to mass consumerism, promising cheap holiday gifts, savings on household upgrades and once-in-a-lifetime deals, all painted with festive wrapping to hide the reality that Black Friday prices are often the same or more expensive than regular prices throughout the year.
In fact, according to CNBC, 98% of Black Friday prices from 2021 were either the same or cheaper throughout the year outside of the shopping event. That means that only 2% of Black Friday sales were genuinely at their lowest price of the year during the event.
Black Friday sales also tend to create environments that build pressure and lead to more impulsive purchases. When breaking down seasonal shopping events in general, a paper from the Journal of Fashion Technology & Textile Engineering discusses the use of marketing techniques that are designed to create a sense of urgency through the presentation of items in limited quantities, available for specific, short windows and the promise of better deals to early birds through a first-come, first-serve ideology.
This leads customers to feel inclined to participate, as they feel they might miss out on an item or discount if they don’t rush to the stores to buy whatever and however much they can.
The possibility of missing sales or limited-edition items, alongside the pressure to be involved, leads people to form lines at all hours of the morning or even camp out the night before. Furthermore, it creates chaos and disorder in the stores themselves, leading to stressful shopping experiences with an almost-competitive feel.
For some people, Black Friday is a social event that is less about the sales and more about tradition when it comes to a day of shopping with friends and family. However, the scale of the event – consisting of masses of consumers in combination with the desire to seize deals before they disappear – leads average shoppers to be taken advantage of, as they overlook whether the so-called discounts are really honest.
The fact that people wait all year to do their holiday shopping, put off buying more expensive items, and are convinced through marketing and anchor prices that they are saving money, leads Black Friday to become a total scam. The pressure to spend more to save more is simply a ploy to benefit retailers, as consumers are deceived into paying more than items are worth.
