Every year my interest in Black Friday fluctuates. Some years I’m ready to swipe my credit card all day and other times I have no interest. But for what has become its own kind of holiday squished between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I know very little about Black Friday, its origins, its date, and why it’s a strictly commercialized celebration.
Several origins of Black Friday
The most common explanation of Black Friday comes from Philadelphia in the 1960s. Law enforcement in the city used the phrase “Black Friday” when tourists would come to the city to do holiday shopping. During some years, the annual Army-Navy football game would also create chaotic crowds, creating long shifts and other problems for police officers.
The phrase “Black Friday” was actually used originally in 1869, when James Fish and Jay Gould bought up as much gold as they could to drive the price up and then sell it. On a Friday in September, the stock market plummeted and bankrupted most of Wall Street. Business Insider states that “the stock market dropped 20% and foreign trade stopped. Farmers suffered a 50% dip in wheat and corn harvest value.”
Why shopping?
If you’re not familiar with a company’s financial statement, let me give you a quick Finance 101 from what I remember from that class. When companies aren’t making a profit, they are in the red; when they are making a profit, they’re in the red (these colors stem from when accounting was done by hand, and red and black ink were used to signify a profit or loss). Because companies would see record profits the day after Thanksgiving from eager holiday shoppers, companies would then operate in the black. Most sources say that this isn’t quite where the name actually came from (see above), but it does make pretty good sense. Funnily enough, Black Friday isn’t the number one shopping day of the year, and the days leading up to Christmas is when companies report the highest sales.
Plus, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, celebrating almost 100 years, also indicates the beginning of the shopping season for the holidays. During the early 1900s, many retailers could agree that they wouldn’t advertise for the holidays until after Thanksgiving, but once Friday rolled around, the holiday cheer could commence.
And did you know that Thanksgiving used to be celebrated on November 30th? President Roosevelt moved the holiday up one week in November to be the new Thanksgiving to add an extra week onto the shopping season.
Don’t forget about the other days!
Black Friday has more recently given way to other retail-centric events like Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.
According to Reader’s Digest, “Americans spent more than $9 billion online for Cyber Monday, making it the biggest e-commerce sales day in the country.” Cyber Monday began in 2005, after Ellen Davis, senior vice president of research and strategic initiatives for the National Retail Federation (NRF), coined the term. NRF “had noticed a recurring spike in online revenue and traffic on the Monday following Thanksgiving. They believed it was because people were making purchases from their computers at work, where the Internet connections were faster and their kids couldn’t get a sneak peek at their gifts.” Moreover, online retailers like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart didn’t see the same earnings from Black Friday as regular brick-and-mortar stores, thus needing a way to boost sales, too. The NRF issued a press release in 2005, and its trend as the most profitable online shopping day in the country has continued since.
Whether you participate in person, online, or not at all, I hope you learned a bit more about the history of Black Friday – happy shopping!