57 pages • 1 hour read
Friday Black
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“Friday Black” Summary
This story takes place in a world where an infection called Friday Black causes people to exhibit zombie-like behavior, characterized by a hunger for Black Friday deals. Unless they acquire the products they want, the infected remain aggressive and violent to those around them.
To incentivize the sales team to hit their goals, the Prominent Mall’s district manager, Richard, sets up a contest to give the best-performing salesperson any coat of their choice from the store. The unnamed narrator wants to win so he can give his mother an expensive branded parka. The narrator, having been bitten during a previous Black Friday, understands his customers’ fragmentary English, which usually reveals their motivations for buying new things. This makes him a strong performer and a natural mentor for Duo, a new salesman who gets bitten during today’s Black Friday.
After an initial rush of customers, the narrator takes a break. During his reprieve, he thinks about how his family skipped Thanksgiving that year, partly due to the loss of his mother’s job but also because of the family’s growing animosity toward each other. Thanksgiving also reminds him of his impulse to overperform at work, especially after one Black Friday when a competitive sales lead named Wendy sabotaged the sales team by feeding them poisoned pie. Having avoided the pie, the narrator resolved to outperform Wendy, and he overtook her as sales lead.
At the food court, the narrator converses with an infected customer he assisted during the sale. The customer shows him a new television she acquired at her husband’s request, whom she lost in the carnage. The narrator notes that this season is the only time they could have afforded that television.
Richard calls the narrator back after Duo abruptly quits his job. On his way to the floor, the narrator encounters Duo, who expresses his disgust with the sale and its violence. Duo tells the narrator that he doesn’t need the coat to show his mother how much he loves her. The narrator rebuffs his advice but is reminded that his stellar sales performance hasn’t always been rewarded by the mall. When he returns to the store, he saves his manager, Angela, by handing the last remaining parka to the infected girl attacking her. The story ends with the narrator facing down a new horde of shoppers that rush into the mall.
“Friday Black” Analysis
The collection’s title story initiates a loose sequence of stories that center around The Plight of Retail Workers, ending with “In Retail.” In “Friday Black,” this theme is explicitly tied to The Normalization of Violence as retail workers are tasked with closing sales despite the obvious threat the infected hordes of shoppers pose to them.
Much like in “Zimmer Land,” the narrator of “Friday Black” is motivated by the false belief that he can positively affect the system from within. One thing that sets the narrator apart from the other sales team members is that he can understand the infected shoppers, whose broken speech and animalistic behavior immediately evoke images of mindless zombies—an exaggeration of the mindless consumer. A symbolic reading of the shoppers’ characterization is that Black Friday is so attractive to them, it renders them unable to discern between need and want; for the infected, there is only the endless desire to consume through purchase.
In the parlance of zombie stories, the narrator might be described as immune to the virus, having been bitten by a shopper in the past. However, his desires overlap with those of the infected. After his mother loses her job, his family falls out of the seasonal spirit, and the narrator seeks out things that will cheer his mother up. His thinking that the parka will convince his mother that he loves her directly mirrors the logic of his customers. For example, one infected customer delivers a fragmented explanation that his son, who “loves [him] most on Christmas […] wants the one thing” (106)—a branded backpack. Ironically, the narrator is no more enlightened than the mindless horde, lacking the self-preservation instinct that Duo exhibits when he quits.
When the narrator encounters another customer during a lunch break, he learns that the customer lost her family during the sale. Part of her haul includes the television her husband wanted to get but couldn’t afford any other time than Black Friday. The product remains, but the person who felt a need for it is gone. This detail introduces an anti-capitalist critique, condemning not only the zombified shoppers but the society that keeps them impoverished enough to rely on these sales. With this, the story posits that capitalism creates economic circumstances that drive people into this violent, desperate state.
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