My Annual Black Friday Post — This Year With Global Updates!
Mother Jones
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According to the retail industry, “Black Friday” is the day when retail profits for the year go from red to black. Are you skeptical that this is really the origin of the term? You should be. After all, the term Black ___day, in other contexts, has always signified something terrible, like a stock market crash or the start of the Blitz. Is it reasonable to think that retailers deliberately chose this phrase to memorialize their biggest day of the year?
Not really. But to get the real story, we’ll have to trace its origins back in time. Here’s a 1985 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Irwin Greenberg, a 30-year veteran of the retail trade, says it is a Philadelphia expression. “It surely can’t be a merchant’s expression,” he said. A spot check of retailers from across the country suggests that Greenberg might be on to something.
“I’ve never heard it before,” laughed Carol Sanger, a spokeswoman for Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati…”I have no idea what it means,” said Bill Dombrowski, director of media relations for Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. in Los Angeles…From the National Retail Merchants Association, the industry’s trade association in New York, came this terse statement: “Black Friday is not an accepted term in the retail industry…”
Hmm. So as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide. It was only in common use in Philadelphia. But why? If we go back to 1975, the New York Times informs us that it has something to do with the Army-Navy game. The gist of the story is that crowds used to pour into Philadelphia on the Friday after Thanksgiving to shop, they’d stay over to watch the game on Saturday, and then go home. It was the huge crowds that gave the day its bleak name.
But how old is the expression? When did it start? If we go back yet another decade we can find a Philly reference as early as 1966. An advertisement that year in the American Philatelist from a stamp shop in Philadelphia starts out: “‘Black Friday’ is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. ‘Black Friday’ officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.”
But it goes back further than that. A couple of years ago I got an email from a Philadelphia reader who recalled the warnings she got from the older women at Wanamaker’s department store when she worked there in 1971:
They warned me to be prepared for the hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents that would alight from the banks of elevators onto the eighth floor toy department, all racing to see the latest toys on their way to visit Santa. The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it “Black Friday.”
“For years.” But how many years? Ben Zimmer collects some evidence that the term was already in common use by 1961 (common enough that Philly merchants were trying to change the term to “Big Friday”), and passes along an interview with Joseph Barrett, who recounted his role in popularizing the expression when he worked as a reporter in Philadelphia:
In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulletin. In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions. Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. I was worried that maybe Kleger and I had made a mistake in using such a term, so I went to Chief Inspector Albert Trimmer to get him to verify it.
So all the evidence points in one direction. The term originated in Philadelphia, probably sometime in the 50s, and wasn’t in common use in the rest of the country until decades later. And it did indeed refer to something unpleasant: the gigantic Army-Navy-post-Thanksgiving day crowds and traffic jams, which both retail workers and police officers dreaded. The retail industry originally loathed the term, and the whole “red to black” fairy tale was tacked on sometime in the 80s by an overcaffeinated flack trying to put lipstick on a pig that had gotten a little too embarrassing for America’s shopkeepers. The first reference that I’ve found to this usage was in 1982, and by the early 90s it had become the official story.
And today everyone believes it, which is a pretty good demonstration of the power of corporate PR. But now you know the real story behind Black Friday.
UPDATE: Last year, the future of Black Friday was global domination. This year, the future of Black Friday is….better decorum?
Last year, British retail chains embraced Black Friday as a way to get a jump-start on the holiday shopping season. What followed was, as the Brits would say, a shambles….Now, retailers are following a different tack. Some are simply abandoning the shopfest. Others will still do Black Friday, despite the frenzy, because shoppers will be buying….But the day will be a bit more subdued. More refined. More, well, British.
Walmart’s Asda chain was among the first British merchants to adopt Black Friday in 2013, and it’s leading the retreat. Its decision to drum up publicity at one London store last year backfired spectacularly when camera crews filmed hordes of shoppers barging through the doors and fighting over an inadequate number of cheap smartphones and video games. To prevent a repeat of the unseemly drama, Asda canceled Black Friday this year and will spread its discounting from November into January. “Black Friday in its current guise has gone,” says Asda Chief Executive Officer Andy Clarke. “It will be interesting to see how many retailers continue it next year.”
I feel certain this is just a temporary setback. America may lead the world in displays of unfettered greed, but it’s a universal human aspiration. It’s just that it takes a little while to get used to an annual spectacle based on huge mobs of people trampling widows and orphans in order to get good deals on smartphones. But the Romans got used to it,1 and it helped them forge an empire.
Elsewhere, the American tradition of post-Thanksgiving shopping mobs is being imported as Vendredi Noir, Viernes Negro, and plain old English Black Friday. It has now made its way into Colombia, Bolivia, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, South Africa, Nigeria, Lebanon, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, Australia, India, and Mexico. Its foothold is still tentative, possibly because in these countries today is just another Friday. It’s not even a day off work, as God intended. But fear not. Like Halloween, Black Friday is yet another vulgar American holiday that will soon wrap its clammy tentacles around households throughout the world.
1Though in their case, it was mobs of people rushing the Mercatus Traiani for Saturnalia deals on dormouse pie with oyster sauce.
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My Annual Black Friday Post — This Year With Global Updates!
