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Writer's pictureNana

11/24/2023 It Black Friday!


The retail bonanza known as Black Friday is now an integral part of many of our Thanksgiving celebrations, but this holiday tradition has darker roots than we might imagine.


The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869.

Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, worked together to buy up as much as they could of the nation’s gold, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astonishing profits.

On that Friday in September, the conspiracy finally unraveled, sending the stock market into free-fall and bankrupting everyone from Wall Street barons to farmers.


The real history behind Black Friday, however, is not as sunny as retailers might have you believe.

Back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year.

Not only were Philly cops not able to take the day off, but they had to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic.

Shoplifters also took advantage of the bedlam in stores and made off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache.


By 1961, “Black Friday” had caught on in Philadelphia, to the extent that the city’s merchants and boosters tried unsuccessfully to change it to “Big Friday” in order to remove the negative connotations.

The term didn’t spread to the rest of the country until much later, however, and as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide.

Sometime in the late 1980s, however, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the “red to black” concept of the holiday and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America’s stores finally turned a profit.


The Black Friday story stuck, and pretty soon the term’s darker roots in Philadelphia were largely forgotten. Since then, the one-day sales bonanza has morphed into a four-days or more event, and spawned other “retail holidays” such as Small Business Saturday/Sunday and Cyber Monday. Stores started opening earlier and earlier on that Friday, and now the best news is that the most dedicated shoppers can head out right after their Thanksgiving meal!


I wish you the best of luck with shopping this black Friday!

May the shopping geek inside you unleash its true potential and shop blissfully throughout the day!


Nana


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