Some retailers extend their promotions into Monday (“Cyber Monday”) or an entire week (“Cyber Week”).
The busiest shopping day of the year in the US has historically been Black Friday.[3][4][5]
Etymology
Days when tragedies occurred have been referred to as “black” financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to dominate the gold market by taking use of their connections with the Grant Administration, is the most important instance and one day, fortunes were made and destroyed, and Abel Corbin, the president’s own brother-in-law, suffered disastrous results.
in the journal Factory Management and Maintenance. In this instance, it refers to the custom of employees reporting sick the day following Thanksgiving in order to enjoy a four-day weekend. However, it doesn’t seem like this use has taken off. The police in Philadelphia and Rochester began to refer to the crowds and traffic jams that accompanied the beginning of the holiday shopping season as “Black Friday” and “Black Saturday” about the same time. Attempts were made to improve the situation in Philadelphia in 1961, and a public relations specialist suggested rebranding the days as “Big Friday” and “Big Saturday,” but these phrases were quickly forgotten.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
The phrase was first used on November 29, 1975, in The New York Times, where it still expressly refers to “the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year” in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted in 1985 that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were still unfamiliar with the term, despite the fact that it quickly gained greater popularity.[12]
Merchants who objected to the use of a derisive term to refer to one of the most significant shopping days of the year proposed an alternative derivation: that historically, retailers operated at a loss for the majority starting on the day after Thanksgiving.[6] Historically widespread accounting techniques used red ink to represent negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts when this was documented in the financial records. According to this notion, Black Friday marks the start of the time when shops would start to realize profits for the year and would no longer be “in the red.”[6][12][13] This explanation is first mentioned in print in The Philadelphia Inquirer article from November 28, 1981.[14]
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, American-based businesses have made an effort to spread the concept of a retail “Black Friday” to other nations. In order to compete with online shops headquartered in the US, retailers outside of the US have tried to promote the day.[15]
Global retailers have started using the term and date to promote their own holiday sales in more recent decades.[16]
History
Thanksgiving parades, providing the impressionsignificant Christian holiday after Thanksgiving.
The connection between Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping caused debate in the 1930s. Retailers would have preferred a longer shopping season, but nobody wanted to start promoting before Thanksgiving and break with tradition. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a presidential decree in 1939 changing the date of Thanksgiving from the final Thursday of November to the fourth Thursday, which in some years means one week earlier.[17] The majority of people embraced the President’s shift, which was later strengthened by a congressional legislation, although many others remained to observe Thanksgiving on the customary day.[17] Some people began calling the new day “Franksgiving.”
offers on what they named “Prime Day” in 2015, claiming to have better deals than Black Friday. Amazon resumed the strategy in 2016 and 2017, at which point other businesses started providing comparable discounts.[18]
The COVID-19 pandemic, according to analyst Marshal Cohen of The NPD Group, has sped up the decline of Black Friday in favor of online shopping[19] in 2020. Due to the epidemic, Christmas discounts were also made available throughout a longer period of time, even as early as October.[20] On Black Friday 2020, fewer individuals went shopping in-person and more purchases were made online. According to market research firm Numerator, producers of clothing, tools, and other products deemed unnecessary during lockdowns did not advertise as aggressively because there were fewer of these items available to buy.[21] Online sales reportedly hit $9 billion in 2020, up 22% from the prior year, according to Adobe Analytics. RetailNext reported a 48% drop in foot traffic to stores from the previous year, while Sensormatic Solutions claimed a 52% drop.[22]
