Hard News
The bleak history of America's busiest shopping day of the year
Sanshray Vallecha, Editor in Chief | 11/12/2021
Thanksgiving is one of the biggest holidays of the year, where families reunite and have a feast to celebrate the tradition set by the Plymouth pilgrims and the Wampanoag people. Unfortunately, a different holiday has taken the spotlight from Thanksgiving in recent years: Black Friday.
Black Friday is America’s busiest shopping day of the year, where consumers are projected to buy $9.5 billion worth of products, along with another projected $11.3 billion on Cyber Monday. The greatest deals are available at almost every store in America, and Cyber Weekend is where millions of families start their holiday shopping.
Consumers think that Black Friday has that name because thousands of companies are going “into the black,” which is an accounting term that means making profit. However, this is not the true origin of the term.
The term was first used in a retail sense to the two days after Thanksgiving that resulted in a sales boom. In Philadelphia in 1961, the police and bus drivers coined the term because of the plentiful traffic jams, and congested streets with pedestrians and cyclists.
Photo credit: blackfriday.com
In an effort to remove the negative connotation, Philly’s biggest companies tried to change the name to “Big Friday,” but this change never came to fruition. By 1975, The New York Times used the term as the day in between Thanksgiving and the Army-Navy game.
From the 1990s to early 2000s, the retailers would open their doors early on Black Friday, around 6:00 AM, and would close at their normal times.
From the late 2000s onwards, retailers have opened at midnight on Thanksgiving day and open for at least the next 24 hours straight. With COVID-19 and its restrictions, retailers are now offering more online deals to consumers and online sales skyrocketed.
On Black Friday in 2020 alone, $9.03 billion was spent online, which is expected to grow to $9.5 billion this year. Also, Cyber Weekend is projected to draw in $36 billion, which is 17% of the whole holiday season.
As we look to the future of Black Friday, and its increasing online prevalence, we are getting away from the in-person injuries that have occurred on Black Friday. There have been so many deaths and injuries on Black Friday that there is now a site called blackfridaydeathcount.com that outlines all of the reported injuries and deaths. Since 2006, there have been 14 deaths and 117 injuries on Black Friday, but hopefully this number will not continue to grow.
This year, when we all shop on Black Friday, look back on the past that led up to the retail explosion that drew in 186.4 million shoppers in 2020. Also, be sure to stay safe this Cyber Weekend.