Break On Through To The Other Side

A 2010 clip of people freaking out on Black Friday when entering a Target in Midvale, Utah.

The term “doorbuster” is an excellent example of marketing and mythmaking

It’s one thing to determine when an object is created, but a marketing phrase? Good luck with that.

Doorbuster, is an excellent example of this, and depending on where you land, you might find multiple deeply different variations of a well-tread story. Which one is the right one? Rather than just telling you right off the bat, I’m going to present you multiple versions of the same story, and then explain what they say about the way that historic stories fracture over time:

First off, here’s a version taken verbatim from the Wikipedia website:

The term, doorbuster, was coined by James Cash Penney, owner of the Penney store chain which came to be known as J.C. Penney. The word first met the public when Penney’s ran an ad in Alabama’s Tuscaloosa News on January 13, 1949.

Soon, Gimbels began using the new slang term in print advertising in the New York Times that urged readers to “come in for these hard-to-beat door busters”. It wasn’t until 1950 that we saw the term used as one word the way we know it today when Newberry’s printed the term in the Los Angeles Times on July 9, 1950.

These days, doorbusters are typically used during massive sales across North America. They are most prevalent on Black Friday and Boxing Day when many shoppers are out looking for bargains.

Here’s the version I spotted while looking around for an origin story, in my words:

In the 1890s, the Philadelphia-area department store Wanamaker’s, which eventually merged into Macy’s, decided to offer a deep discount on its calico, at a penny per yard. At the time, it was much more common to find calico for between 70¢ and $1, so this was a significant discount. After it put on this wild deal, so many people showed up that, when the store opened up for the day, they broke down the doors. Broken glass everywhere. In the years after this happened, “door-buster” became an informal retail term that eventually found itself in marketing starting in the 1920s. From there, it blew up.

And here’s my speculation on what actually happened, based on 30 minutes of research:

In 1917, a Cedar Rapids department store used the door-buster term as a way to promote the idea of a huge deal to customers. While they may or may not have been first, they do appear to be the first-in-the-wild example I see. Gradually, it started picking up, but because it emerged from the Midwest, another Iowa department store in nearby Davenport felt the need to embellish its origin, so it came up with the above Wanamaker’s tale. (The association with the prominent chain, published in a newspaper around 1925, offered the regional chain credibility. That newspaper, by the way, published the doorbuster term 20 times in 1925 alone, every time in reference to that same chain.) Gradually, the term picked up steam throughout Midwestern and plains states, but then went national as one major Midwestern/plains retailer, J.C. Penney, went mainstream; it first used the term in Nebraska in the 1930s.

(Guess which version I think is the right one?)

That is the problem with trying to track down the origin of concepts—despite the best intentions of everyone involved, it is way too easy for an inaccurate version of a story to pick up interest and authority online. But so too is it easy for a story to gain wings because of a clever marketer who wants to win business.

I have no way of proving that the second story isn’t true, but think about it: Why would this appear in a random Iowa newspaper, and not one in Philadelphia? Sure seems like the way a Jersey Devil-esque myth starts. And yes, J.C. Penney did pick it up, but it did so decades before the cited Wikipedia source they used said it did.

How did I figure this out? A quick search via Newspapers.com highlighted how a term slowly emerged, with the epicenter zero appearing to be Iowa in the 1920s, and slowly fading to Nebraska in the 1930s when J.C. Penney picked it up. How centered on Iowa is this trend? The state with the second-most mentions is Illinois, and those examples (based around the Quad Cities) are also promoting department stores in Iowa.

And let’s be honest, if they did plant a fib in a newspaper, they probably got away with it because it was way easier to make stuff up in the pre-internet era. It’s not unlike the founders’ stories that pick up steam around Silicon Valley. A good myth can travel miles through time and location. But the truth might struggle to even make it outside of town.

I don’t think a marketer could have gotten away with such a fib, handed right to a newspaper, in the 1990s. But the 1920s? Most assuredly.

Black Friday doorbusters: Cut corners, overstock, failed products, and dead-end technology

If you know anything about retail, it’s that retailers are often quite focused on using every marketing strategy in the book to separate you from your dollar.

For example, dollar stores sell unique sizes of products so you can’t price compare. Meanwhile, the manufacturer’s suggested retail price—intended specifically to arm the consumer with information—has was turned into a play on customer emotions.

So yes, retailers (both physical and online) tend to be quite aggressive with playing psychological tricks on consumers. Loss-leaders are one of the best examples of this, and the doorbuster is one of the best examples of one.

Going back to our Qualcomm laptop example above: If you hop on Amazon and visually compare the HP Omnibook 5 laptop to other laptops in the Omnibook line, you won’t immediately catch its weaknesses. But a little digging shows a couple of things:

• The machine’s USB ports top out at 10 gigabits, which is relatively low for a brand new laptop in 2025.
• The keyboard isn’t backlit, something that most consumers tend to expect on laptops in 2025.

And then there’s the Snapdragon X Plus processor it uses, which is a fairly significant downgrade from the Snapdragon X Elite. (But it could be worse—selling for the same price is an Asus laptop with the Snapdragon X, which is even slower than the X Plus. That doesn’t have a backlight either, but it does come with more ports.)

In the past, laptops like these might have cheaped out on RAM or storage or the build quality, but consumers have gotten wise to tricks like these, so instead they’re cheaping out on things like the screen or the backlight instead. (Will be interesting to see how this plays out.)

But on the surface, it looks very similar to other HP laptops, so as a result, you just see lower price—when spending just $80 more could get you a much better laptop from the same brand.

A clip of people shopping on Black Friday in a Walmart in 2005. Printers and TV/DVD combo units—sounds like Black Friday in the 2000s to me.

Electronics are great examples of this cut-down strategy in action, and in retail settings, TV sets are sort of the classic example of this. Before the 2000s, giant TV sets were big and heavy, which made them poor loss-leaders. The solution? Offer a smaller TV set, but with a built-in gimmick, like a TV/VCR combo, or make the TV minuscule.

Or maybe it might be a product where the manufacturer really makes its money down the line, like a printer.

But with the rise of flat-screen TV sets, it is possible to sell very large televisions for fairly low prices.

But those get cut down in other ways. Case in point: As I write this, there is a 65-inch TV on the Best Buy website that is selling for $229. This TV uses a type of technology called “direct lit,” a type of budget TV that basically sprays light consistently across the screen. There’s no local dimming, which can make blacks look blacker. (There’s also no edge-lighting, the approach many ultra-thin TVs use—though those have their own problems.)

These cheaper LEDs also come with fewer HDMI ports, which you may not notice when buying, but might be annoyed by when you try to plug in a game console or two. (They may also come with smart software packed with ads, which is really paying for the device.) The result is fine, but you’re ultimately going to be less happy with that device long-term. That’s fine, you got a deal on it.

In a retail setting, the call might be to offer a fuller-fat product, but then only selling a handful of them, limiting the ultimate cost to the consumer. After all, if you’re already in the store, odds are you’re not going to leave even if you didn’t get your desired laptop.

But there might be other motivations at play—such as a desire to clear inventory. That’s what happened in the fall of 2007, when Walmart and other retailers put HD-DVD players and media on sharp discount.

Just over a month after Black Friday, and presumably weeks after people first set up their new players, Warner Bros. announced that it would stop supporting the format, dealing what proved to be a death blow—and sticking all those Black Friday buyers with dead-end technology. Walmart itself announced it would stop stocking the devices a month after that. (Let that be a warning to anyone thinking of buying a Snapdragon laptop on an extreme discount this weekend.)

It’s a great signifier of the psychology of retail working against the consumer.