Black Friday explained
Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in
the United States
(the fourth Thursday of November). Since 1932, it has been regarded as the
beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S., and most major
retailers open very early (and more recently during overnight hours) and offer
promotional sales. Black Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some
other states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for
state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday such
as Columbus Day. Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving
and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend,
makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential
shoppers. It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since
2005, although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described
it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time.
Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and
shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback.
In 2014, spending volume on Black
Friday fell for the first time since the 2008 recession. $50.9 billion was
spent during the 4-day Black Friday weekend, down 11% from the previous year.
However, the U.S.
economy was not in a recession. Christmas creep has been cited as a factor in
the diminishing importance of Black Friday, as many retailers now spread out
their promotions over the entire months of November and December rather than
concentrate them on a single shopping day or weekend.
The earliest evidence of the
phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping
context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe
the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the
day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty
years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became
that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a
profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the
black".
For many years, it was common for
retailers to open at 6:00 a.m., but in the late 2000s many had crept to
5:00 or 4:00. This was taken to a new extreme in 2011, when several retailers
(including Target, Kohl's, Macy's, Best Buy, and Bealls) opened at midnight for
the first time. In 2012, Walmart and several other retailers announced that
they would open most of their stores at 8:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day,
prompting calls for a walkout among some workers. In 2014, stores such as JCPenney,
Best Buy, and Radio Shack opened at 5:00 PM on Thanksgiving Day while stores
such as Target, Walmart, Belk, and Sears opened at 6:00 PM on Thanksgiving Day.
Three states, Rhode Island, Maine,
and Massachusetts,
prohibit large supermarkets, big box stores, and department stores from opening
on Thanksgiving, due to blue laws.
There have been reports of
violence occurring between shoppers on Black Friday. Since 2006, there have
been 7 reported deaths and 98 injuries throughout the United States.
It is common for prospective shoppers to camp out over the Thanksgiving holiday
in an effort to secure a place in front of the line and thus a better chance at
getting desired items. This poses a significant safety risk (such as the use of
propane and generators in the most elaborate cases, and in general, the
blocking of emergency access and fire lanes, causing at least one city to ban
the practice.)
Origin of the Term
For
centuries, the adjective
"black" has been applied to days upon which calamities occurred. Many
events have been described as "Black Friday", although the most
significant such event in American History was the Panic of 1869, which
occurred when financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk took advantage of their
connections with the Grant Administration in an attempt to corner the gold
market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the
treasury to release a large supply of gold, which halted the run and caused
prices to drop by eighteen percent. Fortunes were made and lost in a single
day, and the president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined.
The earliest known use of
"Black Friday" to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurs in the
journal, Factory Management and Maintenance, for November 1951, and
again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on
the day after Thanksgiving, in order to have a four-day weekend. However, this
use does not appear to have caught on. Around the same time, the terms
"Black Friday" and "Black Saturday" came to be used by the
police in Philadelphia and Rochester to describe the crowds and traffic
congestion accompanying the start of the Christmas shopping season. In 1961,
the city and merchants of Philadelphia
attempted to improve conditions, and a public relations expert recommended
rebranding the days, "Big Friday" and "Big Saturday"; but
these terms were quickly forgotten.
Use of the phrase spread slowly,
first appearing in The New York Times on November 29, 1975, in which it
still refers specifically to "the busiest shopping and traffic day of the
year" in Philadelphia.
Although it soon became more widespread, the Philadelphia Inquirer
reported in 1985 that retailers in Cincinnati
and Los Angeles
were still unaware of the term.
As the phrase gained national
attention in the early 1980s, merchants objecting to the use of a derisive term
to refer to one of the most important shopping days of the year suggested an
alternative derivation: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial
loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during
the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving. When this would be
recorded in the financial records, once-common accounting practices would use
red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. Black
Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would
no longer be "in the red", instead taking in the year's profits. The
earliest known published reference to this explanation occurs in the Philadelphia
Inquirer for November 28, 1981.
In 2013, an internet rumor
alleged that the phrase originated in the American south before the Civil War,
from the practice of selling slaves on the day after Thanksgiving. This was
debunked by Snopes.com in 2015. Although the concept of a national day of
thanksgiving originated in the time of George Washington, it was not until 1863
that President Lincoln declared an annual holiday to be celebrated on the last
Thursday (now the fourth Thursday) in November; and this proclamation would
have been ignored in the Confederacy until after the Civil War
Violence and Chaos
Despite frequent attempts to
control the crowds of shoppers, minor injuries are common among the crowds,
usually as a result of being pushed or thrown to the ground in small stampedes.
While most injuries remain minor, serious injuries and even deliberate violence
have taken place on some Black Fridays.
In 2008, a crowd of approximately
2,000 shoppers in Valley Stream,
New York, waited outside for the
5:00 am opening of the local Wal-Mart. As opening time approached, the
crowd grew anxious and when the doors were opened the crowd pushed forward,
breaking the door down, a 34-year-old employee was trampled to death. The
shoppers did not appear concerned with the victim's fate, expressing refusal to
halt their stampede when other employees attempted to intervene and help the
injured employee, complaining that they had been waiting in the cold and were
not willing to wait any longer. Shoppers had begun assembling as early as 9:00
PM the evening before. Even when police arrived and attempted to render aid to
the injured man, shoppers continued to pour in, shoving and pushing the
officers as they made their way into the store. Several other people incurred
minor injuries, including a pregnant woman who had to be taken to the hospital.
The incident may be the first case of a death occurring during Black Friday
sales; according to the National Retail Federation, "We are not aware of
any other circumstances where a retail employee has died working on the day
after Thanksgiving."
On the same day, two people were
fatally shot during an altercation at a Toys 'R' Us in Palm Desert, California.
During Black Friday 2010, a Madison, Wisconsin
woman was arrested outside of a Toys 'R' Us store after cutting in line, and
threatening to shoot other shoppers who tried to object. A Toys for Tots
volunteer in Georgia
was stabbed by a shoplifter. An Indianapolis
woman was arrested after causing a disturbance by arguing with other Wal-Mart
shoppers. She had been asked to leave the store, but refused. A man was
arrested at a Florida Wal-Mart on drug and weapons charges after other shoppers
waiting in line for the store to open noticed that he was carrying a handgun
and reported the matter to police. He was discovered to also be carrying two
knives and a pepper spray grenade. A man in Buffalo, New York,
was trampled when doors opened at a Target store and unruly shoppers rushed in,
in an episode reminiscent of the deadly 2008 Wal-Mart stampede.
On Black Friday 2011, a woman at
a Porter Ranch, California Walmart used pepper spray on fellow shoppers,
causing minor injuries to a reported 20 people who had been waiting hours for
the store to open. The incident started as people waited in line for the newly
discounted Xbox 360. A witness said a woman with two children in tow became
upset with the way people were pushing in line. The witness said she pulled out
pepper spray and sprayed the other people in line. Another account stated:
"The store had brought out a crate of discounted Xbox 360s, and a crowd
had formed to wait for the unwrapping, when the woman began spraying people 'in
order to get an advantage,' according to the police. In an incident outside a
Walmart store in San Leandro,
California, one man was wounded
after being shot following Black Friday shopping at about 1:45 am.
On Black Friday 2012, two people
were shot outside a Wal-Mart in Tallahassee,
Florida, during a dispute over a
parking space.
On Black Friday in 2013, a person
in Las Vegas
who was carrying a big-screen TV home from a Target store on Thanksgiving was
shot in the leg as he tried to wrestle the item back from a robber who had just
stolen it from him at gunpoint. In Romeoville
IL, a police officer shot a
suspected shoplifter driving a car that was dragging a fellow officer at a
Kohl's department store. The suspect and the dragged officer were treated for
shoulder injuries. Three people were arrested.
At the Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia a fight was
caught on camera in which a woman was taken to the ground. The video also
caught a separate, possibly related, fight happening simultaneously.
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