The Mysterious Viral Spread of Black Friday in the 2010s

I hope my fellow Americans are having a great Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and that those among us who are excited by “Black Friday” are enjoying that as well. I confess not to being much of a consumer, but I too have been taken in by its allure. Here’s a taste as to why:

What’s going on here? Well, if you go to google trends and plug in “Black Friday,” you will get some version of this graph for pretty much any country in the world outside of the United States. Here’s France. And here’s the UK. And that graph above is for… Venezuela!!

So you agree with me, right? You agree that it’s crazy that an American consumerist bonanza called “Black Friday” started to show up in a country run by America’s biggest opponent in the Western hemisphere in this period, a country led by a dictator nominally committed to socialism? Not to mention the fact that “Black Friday” is an English phrase, so the fact that this cultural concept derives from American cultural hegemony (which Chavez railed against as much as anyone) would be obvious to everyone.

I dare you. Try this on any country in the world. Cuba. China. Russia. You can see this trend. Venezuela is actually pretty early. Most of the countries I’ve checked show the trend really taking off around 2015. Interestingly, there seems to have been a peak in 2019; it seems like the pandemic disrupted things.

But now I’ve exhausted what I know. What I don’t know is why did Black Friday go viral and why specifically in the 2010s?

I’m interested in this question beyond the usual reasons for curiosity. In particular, my book project on the invention and spread of the seven-day week has made me keenly interested in how concepts and practices relating to the week spread around the world, the most notable example in modern times being the 2-day period that came to be known "as “the weekend.”

There are some similarities in that the weekend in its modern form too began in the United States (after an important pre-history in the UK), with the American (and British) influence reflected in the fact that many languages use the English term weekend or a loan-translation rather than a ‘native’ phrase that might have emerged organically. Black Friday though seems to be a more extreme form of this (I’d be curious if there are any loan-translations in use out there rather than the English phrase) and it seems to have spread much more rapidly. (As late as 1954, German employers were skittish about adopting a five-day work week, despite the successful ‘demonstration’ case in the U.S.). And there are plenty of countries today that never adopted a five-day work week.

When you consider Black Friday in light of the weekend, it’s not so surprising it has spread as fast as it did. In short, Black Friday is just a name for a sale and there is nothing to stop retailers from holding sales. By contrast, before the institutionalization of the five-day week, many employers (like those Germans) did not want to close shop on Saturday. Moreover, contrary to popular myth, many workers didn’t want to stop working on Saturdays either (unless they could be guaranteed the same pay, and how were you going to guarantee that?). Have you noticed that the labor movement is not at the forefront of the push for a four-day work week and that you too are ambivalent about it (OK, if you’re an enthusiast, see how many of your friends you can get to make this their cause celebre). It’s roughly the same thing.

But if that explains why Black Friday could spread without much opposition once retailers latched onto it, it hardly explains how widely it has spread or the timing of this spread. After all, retailers in these countries surely had periodic sales before!

I’ve heard a few ideas from friends about how the phenomenon met a need for inventory clearance in the period leading up to Christmas. But did they really need the concept of ‘Black Friday’ to address this need? Moreover, Vietnam (!!) and Israel don’t have Christmas, and neither do Saudi Arabia or Iran (!!!!). Did Ezra say Black Friday is in Iran? WTF? (Interestingly, it seems to have devolved somewhat in Russia, but perhaps that’s because of Google’s exit from Russia in 2022?).

To be clear, some of these trends may be an artifact of the fact that Black Friday is an English phrase. So if the phrase is actually not used by retailers in a given country but, say, American expats are in a country and are looking for Black Friday sales or whatnot, it would show spikes in that country. But much of this phenomenon is certainly real. So why did Black Friday go viral and why, when it did?

N.B. Edited just after posting!!

Just after posting this and sending it to my email subscribers (who won’t see this unless they click through…), an idea popped into my head that could resolve our mystery.

In short, maybe ‘Black Friday’ is just a useful ‘coordination device’ for retailers to facilitate a practice they were already engaged in but couldn’t engage in as effectively without coordinating effectively among themselves. And this coordination would have been hard to pull off before the concept of ‘Black Friday’ arrived.

This possibility is suggested by various pieces of existing research, most notably Ethan Mollick’s brilliant, classic, analysis of Moore’s Law as a coordination device for smoothing boom and bust cycles associated with investments in capacity for semiconductor manufacturing. Without getting into details of that case, here’s how the logic may apply— not so much for coordinating long-term planning for coordinating the lowering and raising of prices over the short term.

In short, it may be that retailers in various countries each have an interest in holding seasonal sales but they are reluctant to launch such sales on their own. And so the social expectation that there will be sales in a particular season give each of these retail ‘cover’ or ‘safety in numbers’ in holding such sales.

But why couldn’t they easily hold sales on their own? They certainly would have had reasons to try! After all, if I lower prices when everyone else keeps theirs high, I will clean up! Ah, but there are two problems.

First, if my competitors are able to bring prices down too, they will do so, and then we’ll have lowered all of our profits; not good! Moreover, how will we raise prices again? A collective, seasonal, sale solves this problem by coordinating our timing of both when to drop price and when to raise price again. Everyone knows that this is not a price war, but a way for all of us to clear out inventory.

Second, if they are going to be alone in doing so, in part because it might send a negative signal to consumers about the quality or popularity of their merchandise. But if it’s a general market expectation that there will be such sales, that eliminates any negative signal. And if we can frame it as a fun way to experience the marketplace and it has the prestige of America, so much the better!

This of course doesn’t explain why B.F. spread when it did. Instead, it suggests that it could have happened five or ten years before (one imagines that the rise of e-commerce was important for creating greater global awareness of retailing) but that once retailers (in a given country) got wind of this as a great way to be able to lower and raise prices as they always wanted too, it spread like wildfire.

Of course, the above is just conjecture. I’d be very grateful for any thoughts you might have.

Happy Black Friday, Shabbat Shalom, and Happy weekend!