Black Friday, also known as the day after Thanksgiving, has grown to be one of the biggest shopping days of the year in the US. While offering comparable discounts online, national chain businesses typically provide limited time discounts on a broad range of products in an effort to draw customers into their stores.
Many people think that the origin of the word "Black Friday" is the idea that companies are "in the red," or operating at a loss, until the day after Thanksgiving, when huge sales enable them to finally turn a profit, or put them "in the black." But this is not accurate.
A more accurate history of the term can be found in the early 1960s, when Philadelphia police officers coined the term "Black Friday" to refer to the chaos that erupted when a sizable influx of suburban tourists entered the city to start their holiday shopping and, in certain cases, to attend the annual Army-Navy football game on Saturday. The cops, who had to work longer shifts than normal to handle traffic bottlenecks, accidents, shoplifting, and other concerns, found the large crowds to be a headache.
The phrase "Black Friday" quickly gained traction in Philadelphia. The day was given a more attractive name, "Big Friday," by city merchants.
The national adoption of the term "Black Friday" to denote a spike in retail sales did not occur until the late 1980s, when retailers began to disseminate the red-to-black profit narrative. Black Friday was dubbed the biggest shopping day in the US and the day that stores started to generate a profit for the year.
Actually, the Saturday before Christmas was when most stores witnessed the biggest sales. Other shopping holidays, such as Small Business Saturday, which encourages customers to visit local stores, and Cyber Monday, which stimulates online purchasing, have supplanted Black Friday in recent years. Giving Tuesday was also created to encourage donations to charities.
Black Friday has an additional historical meaning that has nothing to do with shopping. Wall Street financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk bought as much gold as they could at the New York Gold Exchange in 1869 in an attempt to corner the country's gold market and drive prices through the roof. Their plot collapsed on Friday, September 24, as a result of President Ulysses S. Grant's involvement. In an instant, the stock market crashed, forcing thousands of Americans into bankruptcy.
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