The Black Friday History: 4 Things You Will Love To Know
Black Friday is about to come. Let’s check out interesting information about Black Friday history and answer questions about the origin of this most anticipated shopping event.
Black Friday is the unofficial name for the Friday after Thanksgiving Day. This day is considered a large-scale sale event in the United States and is the opening day for the Christmas shopping season through the end of the year.
On this occasion, police and functional forces have to work overtime to deal with rising problems when shopping services are overloaded because of the large number of people at stores, leading to chaos.
So when was the beginning of Black Friday history? Scroll down and learn about the origin of this biggest shopping day in the world!
1. The connection between
Black Friday History and Slavery
There are different interpretations of the origin of the term Black Friday. Recently, under the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there have been many opinions explaining the phrase Black Friday. People said it stemmed from the fact that plantation owners sold black slaves at a low price during the slave-era period in America.
So is Black Friday history related to slavery in America?
The answer is NO.
The researchers all denied this explanation. However, it did not stop many Americans from tweeting, texting, and posting on Facebook about the rumor, especially around 2014 in the wake of recent protests in Ferguson.
In November of that year, the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in the August shooting death of an unarmed African-American young man, Michael Brown. Therefore, protesters crept into holiday shopping crowds across the country as part of a Black Out Black Friday campaign to draw attention to what they see as a violation of justice.
And Internet rumors only add insult to injury. A Google search linking Black Friday and slavery yields has more than 11 million results and Internet memes about the original Black Friday. Numerous people have misunderstood the truth of Black Friday history and thought that it originated in the time of slavery.
Therefore, we hope that if you do not know or misunderstand the Black Friday history, you will have more accurate information about the beginning of this day. In particular, the term Black Friday only originated nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery. So two events can not be related.
2. The term Black Friday history and origin
In fact, the first time the term Black Friday appeared wasn’t actually associated with shopping. It is related to a financial crisis in the late 1800s. Until the mid-1900s, the name Black Friday became associated with shopping the day after Thanksgiving.
Historically, in 1869, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, two Wall Street financiers, manipulated the gold market by buying and hoarding large amounts of gold, hoping that the price would skyrocket and make huge profits on the resale. However, on Friday, September 24, 1869, this plan backfired, the U.S. gold market crashed, and Fisk and Gould’s actions sent a series of Wall Street barons out of business.
This event later became known as Black Friday.
Read more How to Survive Black Friday: A Definitive Guide for 2021 You Shouldn’t Miss Out.
3. The beginning of
Post-Thanksgiving Shopping Season
Let’s go back to Black Friday history, the biggest shopping day of the year!
The day after Thanksgiving is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season that can be linked together with the idea of a Santa Claus parade. Specifically, Thanksgiving parades often include an appearance by Santa Claus at the end of the parade because Christmas is always the next big holiday after Thanksgiving.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, department stores sponsored many parades. These include the Santa Claus Parade in Canada, sponsored by Eaton’s, and the Thanksgiving Day Parade sponsored by Macy’s. Department stores will use the parades to launch a major advertising campaign.
It eventually became a customary rule that no store would do a Christmas ad before the public procession was over. Thus, the day after Thanksgiving became the day when the shopping season officially began.
Throughout the 1930s, the concept of a shopping day gradually became more popular, although the Great Depression of 1929 caused various problems for retailers.
4. The term Black Friday is associated
with a shopping craze
The first evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia. Officers used the word “black” to describe the chaotic crowds of hundreds of thousands of people crammed each other for shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving and causing traffic jams on the streets, sidewalks. This usage has been around since at least 1961.
Another study explains that “black” originates from the color of black ink in the accounting books of stores. Because in the statistical records of the stores at the time, employees often used black ink and the term “in the black” to refer to profits, as opposed to “in the red” with red ink to indicate losses. Therefore, Black Friday was born with the meaning of a “profitable” time for businesses.
Meanwhile, plenty of people believe simply that its origin came from the crowd waiting in line for the store to open the night before.
After police officers tied the concept of Black Friday to the chaos in Philadelphia, the Black Friday shopping craze became even more popular in the 1970s and 1980s, with a large influx of visitors to the stores.
Today, millions of Americans go to the stores and search the web for the cheapest deals. At the same time, retailers often extend discounts throughout the weekend and end with online sales the following Monday (Cyber Monday).
Don’t celebrate the biggest shopping holiday of the year without thoroughly understanding Black Friday history!
You might also like Top 20 Funny Black Friday Puns to Tease Your Friends This Shopping Season.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét