Seems like I start all my blogs like this lately…. in 2020 Black Friday will look different. I’ve always been curious about the term “Black Friday,” as a descriptor for the day after Thanksgiving….
A popular myth is that the term Black Friday stemmed from slavery. It was the day after Thanksgiving when slave traders would sell slaves for a discount to assist plantation owners with more helpers for the upcoming winter (for cutting and stacking firewood, winter proofing, etc.) — hence the name….
Just to set the record straight, before we go any further, the use of “Black Friday” has nothing to do with the selling of slaves, and the term didn’t even originate until nearly a century after the practice of slavery was abolished in the U.S.
The first recorded use of the term Black Friday was applied not to holiday shopping, but to a financial crisis — specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, worked together to drive the price of gold sky-high and sell it for big profits. On that Friday in September, the conspiracy finally unraveled, sending the stock market into free-fall and bankrupting millions of people.
Another story about the Friday after Thanksgiving shopping-related Black Friday tradition links it to retailers. As the story goes, after an entire year of operating at a loss (“in the red”) stores would supposedly earn a profit (“into the black”) on the day after Thanksgiving, because holiday shoppers blew so much money on discounted merchandise. It is true that retail companies used to record losses in red and profits in black when doing their accounting, so this story lends some credibility to the origin of “Black Friday.”
Another story (some say the “real story”) behind Black Friday is that back in the 1950s, police in Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Not only would Philly cops not be able to take the day off, but they would have to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic. The bedlam in the stores encouraged shoplifters to make off with merchandise and that added to the law enforcement headache.
“Black Friday” related to shopping had caught on in Philadelphia by 1961 to the extent that the city’s merchants tried to change it to “Big Friday” to get away from the negative connotations. Finally in the late 1980s retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, not negatively, on both the merchants and customers. They basically promoted the “red to black” concept and convinced people that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when stores finally turned a profit. The Black Friday story stuck, and pretty soon the term’s darker roots in Philadelphia were largely forgotten.
So Black Friday in 2020 will certainly be different — it’s almost completely online, it started earlier and will last longer, the stores were actually closed on Thanksgiving, many/most things will be advertised electronically and stores will experiment with and use new shipping methods.
Someone once said, “Happiness is not in money, but in shopping.” If you subscribe to that line of thinking, 2020’s Black Friday may work out even better for you…..
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