After Thanksgiving meals there are Black Friday sales worldwide, but have you ever wondered how it started? What is the origin of this sale? Have a read the article below for your reference.
What is the history of Black Friday and when is Black Friday celebrated?
Black Friday refers to two different and unrelated events. Today, it is mostly used in the US to describe the day after Thanksgiving, which many consider to be the opening day of the holiday shopping season and which has long been dubbed as benefiting from deep discounts by retailers.
Black Friday always comes the day after Thanksgiving Day, which falls on the 4th Thursday of November every year. In 2024, Black Friday will be celebrated on 29th November 2024.
Black Friday also refers to September 24, 1869—the day of a financial panic in the US caused by gold speculators.
What is the origin of the term “Black Friday”?
Although many believe that the word Black Friday is ascribed to black meaning profitable or showing no loss, that never came from there.
The color black, remember, has historically been the opposing hue of days of explosive commercial success. Black Friday is about economic gloom. Black Friday was actually first coined in 1869 when financier Jay Gould and railway businessman James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, causing a panic and collapse of the market. More than 60 years later — on October 29, 1929 — another stock market crash known as Black Tuesday began the Great Depression.
Black Friday as an after-Thanksgiving institution is actually based on the term black meaning in “marked by disaster or misfortune.” The term Black Friday was originally used in the 1950s by factory managers to describe how many of their workers opted to call in sick, thereby lengthening the holiday weekend when the time off was over.
Ninety years later, commerce in Philadelphia earned the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday when traffic cops were forced to work 12-hour shifts in horrible traffic conditions. The Army Navy football game is played at the same time yearly, so visitors travel to the city during this period to go shopping for their vacation season items. The phrase became popularized between consumers and merchants in the Philadelphia area, and from that point on it spread across the entire country.
It was then, into the 1980s that we see the birth of what we consider modern-day Black Friday mythology. Though the terms in the black and in the red are business jargon referring to income and expenses, this explanation for one of the year’s busiest shopping days did not emerge until the 1980s — some two decades after Black Friday had become a common phrase.
When does the holiday shopping season begin?
Black Friday is one leg of a still-homegrown trio of shopping-oriented holiday festivals at the start of what many Americans consider to be the holiday season. Black Friday is the oldest of the days, and this period starts with that. Cyber Monday is quite new and so is Small Business Saturday (the day to shop local). Giving Tuesday, the annual charitable giving campaign, occurs on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving. Giving Tuesday occurs every year around the world and is a day dedicated to encouraging people to give.
