Games Tamed Black Friday
Black Friday Shopping Injuries vs Global Video Game Industry Revenue
As video game revenue surged, Black Friday injuries dropped. Gamers are too busy grinding loot boxes to fight over TVs at Walmart. Stay home, play games, save lives.
“The RPG is the most effective civil-unrest mitigation tool in retail history. A Diablo drop ends Black Friday before it starts.”
— Dr. Console Peace, Retail Criminologist
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of Black Friday Shopping Injuries set against Global Video Game Industry Revenue. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move inversely tightly enough to produce r ≈ 45% (negative). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.
Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.
Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.
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