The Things That Matter Never Go on Sale
Alexys receiving her MS infusion.
Black Friday is the one day of the year when the country shows you exactly what it’s willing to discount and exactly what it’s not. It cuts the price on anything useless, disposable, or irrelevant, and keeps the real cost of American life nailed to the floor. The holiday isn’t about savings. It’s a scoreboard. It shows you what this place thinks is optional and what it intends to hold hostage forever.
Walk into any store and you see it immediately. The markdowns land on products no one actually needed. Plastic gadgets. Breakable appliances. Clothing made to fall apart. A thousand versions of the same object with a different label slapped on top. Retail calls it generosity, but it’s inventory they never cared about. The country has no problem giving people a discount on trash.
But the parts of life that people actually need don’t move an inch. There’s no sale on rent. No sale on food. No sale on medical care. No sale on electricity. No sale on anything that decides whether someone stays afloat or sinks. Those prices stay right where companies set them. No apologies. No markdowns. No mercy. Black Friday wraps people in the illusion of relief while the real costs stand in the background, unchanged and undefeated.
The brutality is in the contrast. This country will drop a television by 60 percent but won’t drop the price of something that keeps someone alive by one cent. It’ll discount headphones and toys and low-quality appliances until people sprint for them, but it won’t touch the bills that bury families. It discounts noise. It discounts garbage. It discounts every distraction it can manufacture. But the essentials stay protected like sacred ground, because that’s where the real money is. That’s where the leverage is. That’s where people get trapped.
Black Friday is the ritual that proves it. A country that gives out discounts on everything that doesn’t matter will never offer a break on what does. And it’s not an accident. It’s the design. Keep the necessities at full price. Keep the distractions cheap. Keep people running toward the wrong finish line. Make sure the only things that ever feel affordable are the ones that change nothing.
Black Friday ends the same way every year. Nothing essential gets cheaper, nothing important moves, and the only numbers that change are on people’s credit-card statements. The country keeps the real costs locked in place and lets people run themselves into debt chasing the illusion of relief. That’s the whole design. The sale ends, the bills arrive, and the truth stands untouched: everything that matters stays full price, and you’re the one who pays for believing otherwise.