Thanksgiving Day (which this year falls on November 28) traditionally takes place on the fourth Thursday in November, and the Friday afterward has become known as Black Friday (November 29). It’s the widely regarded start of the Christmas shopping season, and is known for widespread sales with high discounts, for which customers tend to line up outside storefronts overnight, even camping out on some occasions, to be the first inside when a store opens and snag the best deals.
The origins and meaning of the term “Black Friday” for this day are often debated. It’s often said that it refers to the massive increase in shoppers and purchases taking stores out of the “red” (operating at a loss) and into the “black” (making a profit); however, this is not true. In fact, in the 1950s, it was factory managers who coined the term, for how common it was for workers to falsely call in sick the day after Thanksgiving to get themselves a rare four-day weekend, since businesses are often closed on Thanksgiving Day.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that it became associated with shopping, when police officers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania used the name “Black Friday” to describe their difficult situation on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when they had to fight traffic to get into the city for long shifts of doing crowd control, both with the tourists who flocked to the city to start Christmas shopping and with rowdy attendees of the annual Army-Navy football game.
Retailers hoping to avoid negative connotations tried getting the term “Big Friday” to catch on instead once they began actively advertising the day, but it was “Black Friday” that stuck. By the 1980s, hyping up Black Friday deals became commonplace for businesses all across America, and sure enough, shoppers arrived in larger and larger droves to spend more and more money.
Unfortunately, it became a little too popular.
Black Friday is also infamous for considerable violence erupting at popular stores, with people seriously injuring or even killing their fellow shoppers in the fight to grab a popular item or to save a few dollars. Though Black Friday violence has gone down in recent years, with shoppers becoming less interested, big box stores closing, and sales placed further in advance, it is best to err on the side of caution. Especially in the era of online shopping, it is much safer and less of a hassle to just stay home and avoid the chaos — and wait for Cyber Monday to roll around next week!
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