Black Friday.
The day many dread and many anticipate. The day retail employees hide and customers camp out. The day some see as a blasphemy against Thanksgiving, and the day some have come to add to their annual holiday tradition.
“Black Friday” was first used during the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two men, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, bought out as much of the nation’s gold as they could, and when the conspiracy was discovered, the stock market plummeted. Hundreds were bankrupted.
The most commonly circulated story that links Black Friday to retailers is that retailers, after going a full year of operating as a loss or in the red, stores would supposedly begin to earn a profit or go into the black on the day after Thanksgiving. This was proposed because holiday shoppers would blow so much money on merchandise on sale. However, this story is an inaccurate account based on accurate terminology.
Historically, the true story of Black Friday is rather black and gloomy. Masses of individuals would flock to the city of Philadelphia in 1950 the day after Thanksgiving to attend the annual Army-Navy football, and police would use the term Black Friday to refer to it. Police officers in Philadelphia would have to put in long hours and deal with looters who were taking advantage of the chaos.
Black Friday took a while to reach the rest of the country, however, and it wasn’t even popular as early as 1985. Retailers used the red to black connotations to change Black Friday from negative to positive. Now an estimated 135.8 million Americans plan to shop over Thanksgiving weekend, and even more say they will shop on Cyber Monday.
