Black Friday, the official opening to the frenzied Christmas
shopping season, has never been more heavily covered than it was this year.
Paradoxically, it may have never mattered less.
For years, the day after Thanksgiving was a great retail
harbinger, a leading indicator of how the vital Christmas shopping season will
turn out. In an economy driven by consumer spending, Black Friday assumed
totemic importance. Analysts sift through the traffic and sales rung up by mall
retailers the way Roman priests used to inspect chicken entrails for omens. But
thanks to shifts in technology and consumer habits, Black Friday has lost a
great deal of its real and symbolic importance. Sure, millions of Americans
queue up, as if at a party. And, yes, Black Friday provides the spectacle of
gunplay, arrests, and casual violence. But in the future, we may not have Black
Friday to kick around…..
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