Black Friday is not the grandiose shopping day it once used to be. I remember being a little kid, going to Serramonte Mall and the Shops at Tanforan with my mom on the day after Thanksgiving, walking around and seeing the hundreds of people swarming the stores for all of the deals. Back then, I looked forward to Black Friday more than celebrating Thanksgiving. It was treated like a huge event and people came out with intent and purpose. Fast-forward to today, people are waiting on Amazon’s Prime Day, pushing the once revered Black Friday to the wayside. 

Ever since the introduction of online shopping, Black Friday was bound to and has started declining in interest and engagement. After the pandemic, all of the Black Fridays I went to the mall for had noticeably less attendance. I remember being able to see a person everywhere my eyes drifted to, and now I can count the number of people in each store from the outside.

Every time I go to the mall, there are tons of teenagers hanging out and always a minimum of one random person that I know. The decline of Black Friday is even more surprising, given the rise and revitalization of malls as third spaces for teenagers and young adults. A mall like Serramonte, where the selection has been further expanded even after staying alive on the Peninsula, still doesn’t garner that same traction for Black Friday like it used to. 

Even my family doesn’t care about the conquest of going to Serramonte Mall late after Thanksgiving dinner. We used to treat the day as the only day to ever get a good sale, but nowadays that couldn’t be further from the truth. With online stores and sale events like Amazon’s Prime Day, people are more drawn to staying home, ordering online, and waiting out on visibly better deals. This even goes for me; as an Amazon Prime member, Prime Day is something I purposefully wait for, unlike Black Friday, which used to be a personal tradition to go to malls for.

The other day, I was looking to upgrade my phone; unfortunately, my mom convinced me to hold off, but she said something to me that was very telling of the status of Black Friday. She told me that we should wait for Cyber Monday. Not only was Black Friday not even a consideration to her, but it was in direct competition with its neighboring sale event. 

A noticeable factor of the decline in engagement on Black Friday itself can be attributed to the sales themselves. Not only do some sales start as early as the beginning of the month, but some even last till the end of the month as well, spreading the consumer traffic across the whole month of November. 

 Besides that, the deals are not even that great anymore. In 2023, I saw a household decoration item on sale marked down from $15 to $12 for Black Friday. However, when I came back after the sales were all over, the item was $12 in the first place. I was shocked but not surprised.

Black Friday used to be a day where it felt like the whole city came to the same mall to fight each other over random, discounted household items they really didn’t need. In 2025, Black Friday feels like retail’s lazy excuse at sales, while juggernauts like Amazon take the reins in giving the people real sales they actually want.