I’ve never heard of this term until this year, and I know it is the day after the US Thanksgiving which for some unknown reason is always on a Thursday(In Canada it always falls on a Monday in October). I also know that the official season for Christmas shopping falls on the following Friday.
What I don’t know is why Americans wait till black Friday to do their Christmas shopping and why am I suddenly hearing the Term “Black Friday”. Also given my many years of existence next to the border, why am I suddenly hearing about all the hysteria surrounding Black Friday.
Also, do you Americans enjoy this unique cultural event ?
There are a lot of crazy people that enjoy shopping on Black Friday very much. Most of us do everything we can to stay the hell out of it.
Anyway, people wait to shop for two reasons. Number one: the pre-Christmas sales all start tomorrow, because the Christmas shopping season officially starts tomorrow. It’s seen as premature to address Christmas before Thanksgiving. Number two: few of us have the foresight to do our Christmas shopping earlier in the year. For many years I didn’t do mine until Christmas Eve, and I was one of thousands. The store was packed.
I think part of comes from the pre-internet days when you had to buy presents and then mail them to people who you wouldn’t see during Christmas. Obviously, you would need to ship the packages early. That Friday is also a holiday for many people.
It is my understanding that it’s called Black Friday because it marks the day the business starts operating in the black – from here to the end of the year is when retailers make their profits for the year.
As to why you’re just now hearing the term? Don’t know. Maybe your turn in the barrel. The average American doesn’t use the term, and most younger ones probably don’t know it.
I would suggest that most Americans over the age of 40 would associate it with the Stock Market Crash, rather than a shopping day after Thanksgiving.
As to why Thanksgiving occurs on Thursday in the US–Wikipedia implies it was formalized under Abraham Lincoln, in 1863.
Black Friday is not a new term. It goes back decades at least in this meaning. (There are many other days that are called Black Friday in history.)
Wikipedia gives a citation for the earliest printed use of this version of the term, but note that the term was already well known by then.
The reason it’s called Black Friday is also given on that page:
Retailers were calling it Black Friday long before the media started picking it up.
Americans don’t wait until Black Friday to begin shopping. We’ve already had threads complaining about how stores now start the Christmas shopping season the day after Halloween.
The advantage of Black Friday is that it is the day after Thanksgiving, a holiday in which traditionally most factory and office workers have a four-day weekend. That means that families have a free weekday on which to shop, an opportunity too good for retailers not to take advantage of.
Why Thursday for Thanksgiving? Because Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving to be held on the last Thursday of November, 1863. The day eventually became a major national holiday, always on a Thursday. By act of Congress in 1941, the date it was held was fixed as the fourth Thursday of November.
Merchants call it “Black Friday” because they "play catchup’ on their profit and loss ledgers, have special prices, sales, big promotions of all kinds to induce shoppers to be at the door at 5:00 AM for the 5 to 11 AM sales and special prices. Limited quantity/prices, etc. etc.
New product releases, special coupons, and or deals/prices hype get the shopper into the stores.
Today’s newspaper and the one Sunday before Christmas are the biggest issues of the year and New Year’s edition with the so called white sales is probably third. Nowdays the daily paper is getting thinner and thinner. Soon all the news will be via the couputer and much less in hard copy delivered to you door/postal mail box
In the North or England and in Scotland we use the name “Black Eye Friday”, this is name given to the last friday before Christmas. The trend is that there are alot of people getting drunk and start scrapping. If I remember correctly it is the same day that the construction workers start their christmas holiday and have a little too much to drink.
Here are a handful of earlier printed uses of “Black Friday” in this context, then,
(A 1975 sighting appears in the thread samclem linked to.)
The earliest mention I’ve now found that links “Black Friday” to the whole “red ink” and “black ink” idea comes from the 26 November 1982 broadcast of ABC News’s “World News Tonight,”
In the end, while I don’t have any proof of it, I’m pretty convinced that grumpy and harried store employees and transit workers were the first to dub the day “Black Friday” specifically because of the onslaught of throngs of grumpy and harried holiday shoppers. I suspect that retailers in the mid-Atlantic states later put forth the notion that “Black Friday” came about because it’s the day that businesses “go back into the black.” Putting a positive spin on the term was perhaps a strategy to bring even more shoppers into stores.
I’ve pretty much always referred to it as “Black Friday” since the late 1980s.
IIRC, new studies have shown that Black Friday is not the day when most purchases are made, that distinction goes to the last Saturday before Xmas. However, Black Friday is still the most crowded shopping day.
Regardless of its correct usage, I think a lot of employees use the term because it’s a terrible day to work. It’s a mad rush from dawn until closing and then the stores are a horrible mess which has to be cleaned before people can go home,
I can tell you this: ‘up’ here in Canada, our debit machines stopped working at about noon today. I went out for lunch at a fast food place; they asked if I had cash, because no debit/credit was working. My boss came in late in the afternoon, and mentioned that where she’d been, the debit machines were down.
I put two and two together, and said “Black Friday in the US.”
Heard on the news on the way home from work that my brilliant deduction was correct: so many transactions trying to go through gummed up the debit/credit system.
A lot of people seem to be offering this explanation, even several local news shows today. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me. Too many retailers’ FY cycles have no relation to the calendar year. I checked about a dozen that came to mind right away and about half had their FY end between Dec 1 and Feb 1 (most on Feb 1), but the other half were scattered:
Best Buy - Feb 27
Starbucks - Oct 1
Microsoft - Jul 1
Nike - June 1
Apple Computer - Oct 1
Circuit City - March 1
Second, I can’t buy that any business model allows the company to operate at a loss eleven months out of the year.
To be honest, you only have 2 retailers in the above list. Starbucks is a restaurant/coffeshop, Nike is a shoe manufacturer, and Apple and Microsoft sell computers and software. Apple does have their new line of stores, but they are a very minor part of their entire balance sheet, comprising about 20% of sales.
I never heard the term Black Friday until maybe a couple few years ago, although I did know the day after Thanksgiving was the beginning of Christmas shopping.
I’ve had people try to explain it to me but I still don’t understand why stores would put things on “special sale” one day out of the year when they could just put the frickin’ stuff on sale every day of the year.
They like to watch little old ladies physically fighting over that last item in the sale bin? How does that actually help their books over the whole year?
It’s worth lowering prices on some items when you are reasonably certain that the volume generated will be so big that profit is still guaranteed, especially from the sales of ancillary goods that aren’t price-reduced.
Lowered prices on days when only a few people will buy only a few goods guarantees that the store will soon be out of business.
With all due respect, in certain areas of the USA, everybody knows this term. I live near the country’s largest factory outlet store complex, Woodbury Common. With 220 stores, it is huge.
The newspapers talk about Black Friday. They run stories before it. It’s big news the day of it ( today ), and they talk about it afterwards. Similarly, the NYC radio and t.v. stations use this term referring to the crush of shoppers that come into the city for early store openings, hoping to do all of their shopping in one day.
My kids have known this term since they were toddlers. So have all of the kids in the greater NYC area, for identical reasons. It is not a New York phenomenon either. Any large city or large shopping center uses this term.
