(Really!)
Black Friday refers to the first shopping day in of the US Christmas season --between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays-- as the day when a lot of retail stores sell enough that they turned their balance sheets from losing money (aka "being in the red") to making money (aka "being in the black"). No more, and no less.
Of course, the chaos that tends to show up on social media regarding customers behaving badly is, sadly, not too far off the truth of things. Having a spouse who works in retail, I'm familiar with stories of people who are assholes during Black Friday.
That being said, I can't help but post a few memes on this somewhat bizarre shopping holiday...
 |
| Leave it to the Star Wars prequels to put a bow on this. From Imgflip. |
 |
| Warhammer being in the thick of Black Friday is oddly appropriate. From Reddit. |
 |
| A WoW friend works at Walmart. I might want to share this with her for her thoughts. From Pinterest. |
 |
| I had a good laugh at this with some of my WoW friends last night, until one of them pointed out that this wouldn't work in the South, as they'd just shoot the "bear" and stick their head on a wall. From Pinterest. |
Heh! You set my fact-checking alarm off with the opening sentence. I remember looking this up a couple of years back, when I was writing a post. I thought the same as you about the derivation of the name "Black Friday" but I wasn't 100% certain so I did some due diligence and to quote Britannica :
ReplyDelete"It is believed by many that the term Black Friday derives from the concept that businesses operate at a financial loss, or are “in the red,” until the day after Thanksgiving, when massive sales finally allow them to turn a profit, or put them “in the black.” However, this is untrue."
The encyclopedia entry goes on to state quite unequivocally that the actual origin comes from "the early 1960s, when police officers in Philadelphia began using the phrase “Black Friday” to describe the chaos that resulted when large numbers of suburban tourists came into the city to begin their holiday shopping and, in some years, attend Saturday’s annual Army-Navy football game." If you google around, you can find quite a few other possible derivations but I'm not about to argue with the world's best-known encyclopedia!
Oh, I'm certain that there's an origin story like that, but the thing is, once you get past a certain point the popular belief becomes the default belief. Kind of how "Sweetest Day" was actually created in Cleveland for the local orphans, and it just so happened that a lot of the execs behind the push for it were involved benefited from the sale of greeting cards and candy, but the popular belief that it was a manufactured holiday to sell said cards and candy dominates the landscape.
DeleteAs for the chaos, that it started in Philly --whose sports fans once pelted Santa Claus with snowballs-- doesn't shock me at all.