Gen Z Thinks Black Friday Is a Scam (But They're Shopping Anyway)
after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition. Think of the Monday-Thursday letters as the CliffsNotes; this is the extended version for paid subscribers.💫
If you’re thinking about upgrading, now is a good time to do it. Next week, I’m publishing my TikTok Christmast list debief gift guide (here’s last year’s). I’m also working on an EOY roundup of everything I’ve been influenced to buy writing this newsletter. 🥴
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving! I cooked, successfully, then rewarded myself with quite a bit of Black Friday shopping (more on what I bought below, if you’re curious). I had planned to watch Thanksgiving, the new Eli Roth screamer starring Addison Rae, and was crushed to discover it was only released in theaters. What a missed opportunity. I can’t be the only person to assume that a horror movie called Thanksgiving released just ahead of Thanksgiving — starring a TikToker, no less — would be available on streaming. It had a good box office opening, so clearly the bet paid off, but I think it would have been a bigger cultural moment if it was available on streaming, too. (I also think it would have been a bigger cultural moment if it wasn’t so impossible to Google; “Thanksgiving movie” yields millions of unrelated results.)
Instead of watching Thanksgiving, I watched what must have been five billion Thanksgiving TikToks, the best of which I’ve linked to below.
Today we’re talking about:
Black Friday recap (including the most-mentioned products in TikTok hauls and some special insights from friend of the letter and shopping Substack queen
)Nuuly’s secret weapon that helped them achieve profitability ahead of competitors
Old Navy is having a killer quarter because of the viral Lilly Sisto cardigan (probably)
Alo Yoga’s turned its sherpa line into a cult-favorite franchise
Delulu is dead
Susan Sarandon’s son is my favorite follow this week
Swifties ruined Harry Jowsey’s life (or dwts run, at least)
Gen Z is mad about the state of nightlife
The triangle of death
“Orange Peel Theory”
Beware of young men with navy sheets
A bunchhhh of Thanksgiving TikTok trends
And everything else that happened this week in youth culture. Before we jump in, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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