What The Media Doesn't Understand About Black Friday Shoppers

by Alan Pyke
Posted on December 1, 2014 at 5:17 pm Updated: December 2, 2014 at 9:53 am
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Cable news producers cultivate eyewitness reports on their ordeals. Online rubberneckers click on videos promising the best fights between them. Internet commentators large and small deride them as a symbol of cultural decline.
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But while the shoppers who stampeded into gigantic retail outlets on "Black Friday" are easy targets for sarcastic sniping in the media, they are also evidence of a far larger failure of the American economy.
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For millions of low-income and middle-class families, the day's deals are a necessity not a luxury. Wages have stagnated for working families since the turn of the century, producing a "lost decade" for working people's quality of life. The slow recovery from the Great Recession has been driven mostly by low-wage job growth rather than by a resurgence in the kinds of jobs that provide enough headroom for a family to treat Black Friday as optional.
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At the same time, the cost of keeping a roof over your head has accelerated significantly. Rent takes up over 30 percent of income for one out of every two households nationwide now, up from 38 percent in 2000. While poverty rates have remained fairly stable, the proportion of people living on the brink of poverty has grown significantly, and four Americans out of every 10 live paycheck to paycheck. Even after Congress passed the first minimum wage hike in more than a decade at the tail end of the Bush era, minimum-wage workers have less buying power than they did 40 years ago.
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The Friday after Thanksgiving was dubbed "Black Friday" by Philadelphia police in the early 1960s because of the added stress shoppers put on law enforcement. It supposedly also marks the point on the calendar when retail shops finally turn a profit on the year and switch to using black ink in their books. With retail sales supporting a huge cross-section of manufacturing, shipping, marketing, and service industry jobs, that tipping point is an important landmark for the economy as a whole.
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