Image by Mike Petrucci.

Black Friday set another record this year. Reporters treated it as proof that Americans still have strength in their wallets and that the economy has life in it. The president called it the “Trump Bump.” The headlines bragged about an eleven point eight billion dollar day and analysts lined up to praise the numbers. None of it holds up once you look at how people paid for those purchases and how much strain sits underneath those sales. A record weekend in a hollowed out economy is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of how far people will push themselves to give their kids one normal holiday in a year that left them with nothing extra.

The record spending didn’t come from rising wages or cash that families finally had on hand. A huge share of this surge ran through buy now, pay later. Cyber Monday alone saw more than a billion dollars of purchases financed in four installments. That kind of borrowing for routine gifts isn’t a sign of strength. It is households trying to bridge the gap created by years of rising costs and policies that made everything more expensive. Toys, clothes, electronics, winter coats. None of this should require financing. The fact that it does tells you what shape the country is in.

Buy now, pay later has become a replacement for every system that once kept families solvent. People don’t turn to short term debt because they want flexibility. They turn to it because the basic math of their lives no longer works. Credit cards are near their limits. Savings accounts are thin. Raises vanish inside insurance premiums and utility bills. Then tariffs drove up prices on everything from clothing to appliances. A country that forces families into micro debt to cover holiday purchases isn’t a country with consumer confidence. It’s a country that lost its guardrails.

Holiday spending rises even when the rest of life gets worse because gifting is one of the last pieces of normalcy people can protect. Parents will cut groceries, skip repairs, and push off bills before they skip Christmas morning. The retail economy relies on that instinct. It needs shoppers to borrow in order to keep the holiday numbers high. Retailers frame buy now, pay later as a helpful tool that smooths out large purchases. Strip away the marketing and you see what’s really going on. Seasonal profit depends on households taking financial hits so companies can show strong numbers to investors.

The praise from economists falls apart when set against the actual conditions people are living in. Prices rose because tariff policy raised the cost of basic imports. Inflation climbed again. Unemployment stayed high. Healthcare costs absorbed the rest of the paycheck. Every one of those pressures came from decisions made far upstream from families who simply want to buy a few gifts in November. The president pointed to the sales numbers as proof his policies work. It ignores the direct consequences of those same policies, which pushed prices higher while wages stayed flat.

This is what collapse looks like in daily life. It doesn’t show up as empty shelves or dramatic announcements. It shows up in the small financial hacks people use to survive a season that used to feel simple. A billion dollars in buy now, pay later on Cyber Monday is one of those signals. It’s households leaning on a private lending tool because the systems designed to support them have already failed. Politicians can ignore it. Retailers can spin it. The families sitting on new installment plans can’t.

The contradiction grows wider every season. Record spending gets reported as a national victory. The debt behind that spending gets ignored. When the public and the press only pay attention to the total number of sales, they miss the far more important question. What does it say about the country when households need installment loans to buy ordinary gifts. That question reveals more about the economy than any upbeat headline.

A strong economy doesn’t force families to borrow for winter clothes and it doesn’t rely on micro debt to carry entire retail seasons. A strong economy doesn’t pretend tariffs have no impact while people feel the increase every time they check out. The story told in the headlines is that Americans are resilient and that their ability to spend proves it. Resilience is a word people use when they refuse to confront the structural failures they helped create.

If you want to understand the real state of the economy, look away from the numbers politicians celebrate. Look at the checkout screen where families divide a small purchase into four payments because their paycheck is already spoken for. Look at the conditions that made that normal. That’s the accurate picture of where the country stands. A holiday season that produces both record spending and record emergency borrowing is not a sign of prosperity. It’s a warning that the systems meant to protect people have already failed, and families are carrying the cost themselves.

The post America Didn’t Have a Boom This Black Friday. It Had a Breakdown appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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