After filling up on food and spending time with loved ones on Thanksgiving, many Americans prepare for the holiday gift giving season by partaking in Black Friday shopping, whether that be heading to the stores right after dinner or waking up at sunrise for shopping.
Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days for Americans and occurs the day after Thanksgiving. In order to encourage people to start their holiday shopping, stores offer large sales. This encourages people to get up early and shop before merchandise runs out.
Although the origins of Black Friday are not completely clear, the history is not what many may expect. For starters, Black Friday was not always about sales and starting your Christmas shopping early.
The first time the term “Black Friday” was used was in 1869 to discuss the crash of the U.S. gold market. Two financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk decided to buy up all the gold they could in hopes that the price would sky-rocket and they could resell their gold at certain prices.
Their plan did not work out and it sent the stock market into a crash.
The term can also relate to the “black to red” phenomenon. This refers to how, when stores are not doing well, their books are in “the red.” Once the stores have an influx in sales they would be “in the black.”
The Black Friday we know of today was not used until the end of the 1900s to refer to the sales that stores have. The term itself originated in Philadelphia.
In the mid-1900s, police officers in Philadelphia started to call the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday because of the large amounts of people who traveled into the city and the chaos it brought to the city.
It was not until later in the 20th century that stores started incorporating sales into their Black Friday deals. Before the largest sales on the Saturday before Christmas. Now Black Friday is used to put businesses back in the black.
According to an article by Sender, last Black Friday sales reached $9.8 billion just online and an estimated 230 million people participated in the shopping event.
