I think I’ve heard of a Black Friday in relation to crashing stock prices, but maybe that was a Monday, or Wednesday, I can’t recall. I had never, before this year, heard the Friday after Thanksgiving referred to as “Black Friday”. I’ve asked some other folks too and none of them have either.
All the sudden it’s everywhere, and used by everyone.
Is Madison in some kind of information vaccuum bubble?
Have I been sleepwalking for the last few years?
The term’s been around for ages. It’s so called because it commonly marks the point where retail businesses begin to show a profit for the year (in the black).
This link may be of interest:
Apparently. We quite literally answer this question every single year around Thanksgiving. You aren’t even the first thread asking about Black Friday this year.
A cite would be needed.
You could try the links which have already been provided. From the first one:
Except that Wikipedia shows the origin of the term is earlier, 1966, and your own cite says that is not the true origin but a cosmetic “alternative theory” made up to avoid the negative image the name conveys.
Not to mention that I do not believe for a second that “retailers operated at a loss from January to the end of November”. That is plain nonsense.
If it makes you feel any better, I was asking a buddy of mine the same question today. I really don’t remember hearing the term applied to the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Yeah, I wouldn’t really believe that the early 80s counts as “ages”. One age, maybe 
OTOH, I can readily believe that many if not most retailers don’t show a profit until around Black Friday since the profit margins in many sectors are pretty tiny. Even with raw profit margins of 50% on items, which is high for retailers overall, overhead will eat into that pretty quickly.
That’s without accounting. I don’t know how retail accounting works but if you look at it as if your expenses for stocking up for the holidays were costed before the holidays only to be recouped during them I think it’s safe to say that that nearly all retailers that are dependent on the holidays would fall under that criteria, even if they might have shown a profit before Black Friday had they not stocked up in anticipation of the holidays.
In one way of looking at it that’s not really fair. But, while I also plead ignorance as to the tendency of financial arrangements between supplier and stores, if wholesalers demand cash rather than extend credit, then that accounting point of view is totally legit from a free cash flow perspective. Most holiday-dependent retailers cash flow will be tighter before the holidays.
While is may have been used from time to time for a long time, I had never heard the term used commonly until the 1980s or later. And I grew up in retail and worked in retail business up until 1980.
My father never had to depend on that day to make a profit, either, nor did Spencer Gifts in the 70s. It was just the start of the Christmas shopping season and at some point the term – which may have been used in a few limited cases – became the general one. (It’s also not the busiest shopping day of the year.) But it’s like “Internet Monday” – a term that was coined and which pretended to have some actual relevance to the day.
The funny thing is, until a few years ago it’s a term I only heard among other retail workers (when I worked retail.) And it was definitely used more in the sense of “It’s the most suckiest day of the year!” than “Back in black!”
A 2006 Black Friday thread.
And a 2002 thread, “Black Friday”: How long has it been called that?, featuring some of Tammi Terrell’s earliest etymological detective work.