The headline numbers from Thanksgiving weekend 2025 look triumphant. Shoppers spent $6.4 billion online on Thanksgiving Day and another $11.8 billion on Black Friday—both records and healthy jumps from last year. Mastercard’s broader measure, which includes in-store sales, showed Black Friday up 4.1 percent overall. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett called it a “blockbuster weekend” and declared the American consumer healthy and confident heading into the holidays.

Dig a little deeper, though, and the picture changes. Order volumes actually fell by about 1 percent year-over-year, while average selling prices rose by 7 percent. In plain English, Americans bought roughly the same amount of stuff—or in some cases slightly less—but paid significantly more for each item. Most of the headline growth came from inflation, not from any surge in actual goods moving off shelves and into shopping carts.