Seems some are missing the rant point of your story. It's not about the current increases in shipping cost due to uncontrollable issues like fuel cost or supply chain issues or anything else.

Let's first forget about the Black Friday 30% discount and we go shopping anywhere and see the basic "free shipping" on orders over $600. You go through the catalog and pick out $623 worth of items and one or two of those items are not really needed but they will put you OVER the minimum $600 threshold to qualify for "FREE SHIPPING". You go to checkout and let's say you're doing this by phone and the person at check says "Oh it's Black Friday and you qualify for our Black Friday 30% OFF DISCOUNT!!! I'll take $186 OFF of your total and that now knocks you down under the minimum $600 FREE SHIPPING threshold. And I'm going to now charge you 40% shipping of $210 just to screw you out of thinking we were going to save you money with a Black Friday discount". (What this means is in order to save 30% you really needed to order $180 more or 30% more of things you didn't need.)

"So now you're not getting a Black Friday discount with FREE SHIPPING but we're making an extra $24 on top of it all and making you pay the shipping costs. That extra $24 I'll use to put fuel in my car I drive to work here. Have you seen the price of gas lately?"

Rant deserved IMO.