Every year, without fail, a payments platform releases a shiny Black Friday report declaring record-breaking numbers, unexpected “growth,” and a miraculous surge in consumer spending. This year, that honour went again to PayJustNow, and their declaration for Black Friday 2025 came packaged in the same glossy optimism: online transactions overtook in-store spending, consumer confidence is back, and South Africans are supposedly shopping with more discipline and purpose than ever before.

It’s a neat headline, but it’s also deeply misleading.

Now their data centers more around 9nline shopping, so if you were anywhere near a mall, a shopping node, or even your own bank balance on Black Friday 2025, you know none of this aligns with lived reality. There were no queues curling around storefronts at 9am. No crowds vibrating with excitement. No sense of urgency in the air. What we did see was the same thing we’ve been seeing for the last few years, a slow, tired trickle of people walking through malls with the kind of detached pragmatism that says, “If I see something worth it, I’ll buy it. But I’m not expecting anything.”

Black Friday in South Africa has lost its teeth. This includes online shopping for Black Friday “Deals” and no amount of data-polishing can revive a holiday that no longer fits our economic condition.

“PayJustNow’s data is PayJustNow’s world, not the country.”

The problem with PayJustNow’s 2025 report is not that the numbers are fabricated, it’s that they’re stretched far beyond their actual representational power. PayJustNow’s user base skews toward online-first fashion brands, younger shoppers, digitally confident consumers, and urban middle-income households. When a platform’s merchant ecosystem is already weighted toward e-commerce, its Black Friday output will naturally skew digital. To then extrapolate this into a national conclusion on South African retail behaviour is not just intellectually sloppy, it’s irresponsible.

The report celebrated that 56% of PayJustNow’s Black Friday transactions occurred online, marking the first time digital supposedly overtook physical spending. What it didn’t emphasise is that this says more about PayJustNow’s corner of the ecosystem than it does about the behaviour of an entire country. A country where offline retail still accounts for the vast majority of actual spend. A country where millions shop in cash. A country where data costs, delivery limitations, and trust gaps remain very real.

The truth is simple: the data reflects the habits of PayJustNow users, not South Africans in general.

Black Friday 2025 also lacked the collective energy that once made the day feel like an event. The era of dramatic queues, overnight anticipation, and opening-hour stampedes is genuinely over. What we saw instead were malls that felt almost eerily normal, slightly busier than an average Friday, yes, but nowhere near the kind of foot traffic that would justify the breathless declarations of record-breaking performance. South Africans are no longer saving for Black Friday because the “specials” no longer feel special. Even with online shopping promotions, the energy from retailers was lacking, the so called specials and discounts were not exactly discounts, a silly example would be the Samsung A06, which retailed at around R1,200 last year as it’s normal rate, this year it has been R1,499, explain why one of the retailers was marketing this rate as a Black Friday deal? We bought the phone none-the less, but it wasn’t on special, and I felt that the “sale” promotions are a form of “window dressing” to give the impression that something is discounted when it isnt. The economy has squeezed the middle class so tightly that a discount is meaningless if the starting price is already out of reach. When petrol rises monthly and the price of a single grocery basket can trigger an existential crisis, Black Friday becomes less of an opportunity and more of a reminder of what we’ve lost.

There’s no frenzy because there’s no disposable income to fuel one. And if retailers and platforms want to claim otherwise, they’ll need to explain why consumers themselves barely registered the day beyond a shrug.

So back to PayJustNow, The contradiction becomes even sharper when we place PayJustNow’s “online surge” narrative alongside what’s happening physically in South Africa: the relentless construction of new malls. We are watching mall after mall break ground across the country every second or third month, massive, multi-level complexes rising in suburbs that barely have basic infrastructure, township developments selling the idea of a retail renaissance, and city expansions that feel out of sync with reality. It becomes impossible not to ask: if online shopping is truly exploding, why is South Africa building malls at the fastest rate we’ve seen in over a decade?

The tension between digital growth and physical expansion reveals how messy the landscape really is. Malls are no longer the safe public spaces they were marketed as. Security has weakened, petty crime is up, human trafficking scares circulate with terrifying regularity, and social frustration bubbles too close to the surface. The entertainment economy inside malls has also collapsed under its own expense; cinemas cost more than some people earn in an hour, kids’ play zones are priced like boutique experiences, and restaurants have become occasional luxuries rather than weekend habits.

And this is where I might come-off as contradictory. Grocery shopping: once a key driver of mall foot traffic has moved predominantly online, with platforms like Checkers Sixty60 and Woolworths Dash handling the “weekly shop” more efficiently than any physical store. Banks are closing branches, government services operate independently from malls, and almost every form of “essential errand” has begun shifting into digital or standalone environments.

Even the design of new malls tells a story. Seating has quietly disappeared. Waiting areas have shrunk or vanished. The architecture is sterile, intentional, and deeply hostile, a retail philosophy that says: Come in. Buy. Leave. That is not a community space, nor is it a cultural heartbeat. It’s a transaction tunnel.

The only thing that seems to be expanding is the square footage. becomes even sharper when we place PayJustNow’s “online surge” narrative alongside what’s happening physically in South Africa: the relentless construction of new malls.

“South Africa keeps building malls for a country that no longer exists.”

What we’re witnessing is not consumer-driven growth, but developer-driven momentum. Malls break ground because funding was approved years earlier, because municipalities want the rates revenue, because large retailers insist on footprint expansion, and because commercial property cycles move slower than cultural or economic shifts. A mall can still be built long after demand has dried up, because building is easier than imagining something different.

Meanwhile, Black Friday continues drifting further away from its heyday. PayJustNow’s data may show more transactions, but what it does not show is context that a rise in BNPL transactions might actually reflect financial strain, not consumer confidence. That transaction volume can increase while profit margins flatline. That people are leaning on installments not to splurge, but to cope. That a statistic can glow on a PDF while reality flickers in the fluorescent lights of a half-empty mall walkway.

Black Friday 2025 did not deliver a miracle. It delivered the same thing 2024 did: proof that South Africans are adjusting, not thriving.

Corporate optimism may be renewable, but consumer wallets are not.