I just came across another reference to today being called “Black Friday”; so named because supposedly today is the day that the balance sheets of most retail stores move from the red and into the black.
(Today is, of course, the day after Thanksgiving here in the US which is supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year (though Snopes says it isn’t) which accounts for the sudden influx of sales.)
I have heard this term used four or five times this week now from multiple sources, but I don’t ever remember hearing it before this. (I have heard the part about the balance sheets before, just never a specific name attached to the day.)
Is this a relatively new term, or has it been around for a while and I’ve just had too much tryptophan in my system this time of year to notice it before?
That name has also be used in reference to the stock market crash of 1929, although the actual crash took place on a tuesday (and that day has been called black tuesday), it started on the friday before (if memory servers) so that day is refered to as black friday.
My usual etymological sources are coming up empty. A search of Google groups shows that the term in this sense is not exactly new, but I never heard of it before this year. This post mentioned it nine years ago.
I hear it everywhere this year, but I learned it last year when I went into retail right before it. It was, at that point, more like professional jargon - something the salespeople said that the customers didn’t.
I’ve heard “black friday” in reference to the day after Thanksgiving for a number of years. I thought this was in fairly common usage, but maybe it started in the northeast.
That was the original use of Black Friday to refer to a stock market crash, but I believe the first use of Black Friday as a specific day refers to December 6, 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charles (aka the Young Pretender) landed in Derby in his attempt to win the throne from George II.
I hear people use this occasionally, but I think they’re just misusing the phrase. I’ve heard dubious etymological claims that its either because (a) it sucks to work on this day, or (b) because all the stores run ‘in the black’ on that day, due to selling so much merchandise.
I don’t like this term, but then, I never worked retail.
Just another use of the term:
The magnitude 9.2 earthquake earthquake that struck Alaska in March 1964 was called either the “Good Friday” or the “Black Friday” earthquake. http://www.alaskayukon.com/community_E/body.html
Having worked retail & escaped, I can tell you it pretty much means both.
While I am sure the term was taken over by retailers from the stock market crash usage, I have nothing to back this thought up, nor any real idea when. Probably in the fifties, as the Christmas season became highly commercialized.
For what it’s worth, the earliest association I can find (in a database of news articles) between “Black Friday” and the day after Thanksgiving that also repeats the “black ink” theme comes from an answer given in, well, the “Answer Line” column of The Evening News [Harrisburg, PA], 16 December 1986.
Little difficult to rely on the Pennsylvania Retailers Association as an etymological source, of course. Point is, the day after Thanksgiving has been known amongst retailers as “Black Friday” (in the sense of getting back into “black ink”) at least since the mid-'80s.
Back issues of The New York Times often provide clues as to the origin of phrases, at least of those used by Americans. In this case, however, searching a database of news pieces that go back to 1857 is not of much help: The Times doesn’t address “Black Friday” in the context of a “back to black” day for retailers until 1995. Which leads me to believe that dubbing the Friday after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday” (in the sense of sales day that’s so successful that it puts a business back “in black”) is of relatively recent origin.
I ought to point out, though, that in Northeastern cities such as Philadelphia and New York, the same day had been called “Black Friday” since at least the mid-'70s, but for a somewhat different reason. It appears that transit workers and other regulars who found themselves in the city on that Friday considered it “Black Friday” because of the woes associated with huge traffic snarls and throngs of shoppers. An early sighting from The New York Times,
Whether Northeastern retailers took “Black Friday,” an already-familiar epithet for the day, and put a positive spin on it by proclaiming it a day to bring businesses out of the red into the black remains to be seen.
Ah, thanks everyone, especially Tammi for the database search and Bibliophage for the Google link. So, it looks as if the Friday after Thanksgiving has been known as “Black Friday” in the retail trade since at least the mid '80s but didn’t make the jump to the mainstream until the past few years. I certainly didn’t hear it until this year and it sounds as if at least a few others didn’t either. It also looks as if it may have originated in the northeast. Apparently it has just finally hit “critical mass” (or whatever you call it in the etymological field) and so suddenly seems to be everywhere. Thanks again everyone.
