Black Friday is favoured as the best time to do festive shopping, but this day does come with its historic faults.
The origins of Black Friday – the day when retailers all over the world offer ridiculous discounts for a wide range of consumers goods – are controversial.
Some link the term to the original Black Friday, which was the day on which slave owners in America would sell off the slaves who had the least value to them for low amounts of money. Another explanation for the modern name could come from the term police in America used to describe the traffic chaos which ensued on the days of huge retail sales.
However, the most logical explanation for the name Black Friday comes from the world of accounting: black ink on a company’s books symbolises profit, red ink stands for losses.
Black Friday started in America on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, and it has spread across the globe like wildfire. It started off in the US as a marketing strategy to make money by focusing on volume sales and to move old stock by drastically reducing prices.
Black Friday can fall on any day or period from November 23 to 29.
Sales can start as early as 5am – and that is why we’ve seen or heard of consumers sleeping outside the stores to get as many products as possible while stocks last.
Over the years, Black Friday has been growing in popularity in South Africa and has now been followed by Cyber Monday, when gamers and tech junkies can shop online for goods.
Some retailers have slowly adopted the practice and have seen good sales in which electronics and consumable products sell well. If you are a business which wants to benefit from Black Friday, you must realise that the prices have to be eye-catching.
The response will be enthusiastic and, because that response may be more than you expect, you better be prepared with extra staff and security arrangements.
Black Friday is favoured as the best time to do festive shopping, but this day does come with its historic faults. Here are some reasons why Black Friday became so notorious.
It makes sense that the term “Black Friday” might refer to the single day of the year when retail companies finally go “into the black” (i.e. make a profit). The day after Thanksgiving is, of course, when crowds of turkey-stuffed shoppers descend on stores all over the country to take advantage of the season’s biggest holiday bargains. But the real story behind Black Friday is a bit more complicated—and darker—than that.
The true story behind Black Friday, however, is not as sunny as retailers might have you believe. Back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Not only would Philly cops not be able to take the day off, but they would have to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic. Shoplifters would also take advantage of the bedlam in stores to make off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache.
By 1961, “Black Friday” had caught on in Philadelphia, to the extent that the city’s merchants and boosters tried unsuccessfully to change it to “Big Friday” in order to remove the negative connotations. The term didn’t spread to the rest of the country until much later, however, and as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide. Sometime in the late 1980s, however, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the “red to black” concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America’s stores finally turned a profit. (In fact, stores traditionally see bigger sales on the Saturday before Christmas.)
The Black Friday story stuck, and pretty soon the term’s darker roots in Philadelphia were largely forgotten. Since then, the one-day sales bonanza has morphed into a four-day event, and spawned other “retail holidays” such as Small Business Saturday/Sunday and Cyber Monday. Stores started opening earlier and earlier on that Friday, and now the most dedicated shoppers can head out right after their Thanksgiving meal. According to a pre-holiday survey this year by the National Retail Federation, an estimated 135.8 million Americans definitely plan to shop over the Thanksgiving weekend (58.7 percent of those surveyed), though even more (183.8 million, or 79.6 percent) said they would or might take advantage of the online deals offered on Cyber Monday.
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