The Thanksgiving celebration comes to an end after the delicious feast and family reunions. The house is cleaned up and leftovers stored, sitting in the fridge for another day. However, the celebration is not yet over! At midnight, shops open their doors to welcome early customers with new deals impossible to pass up. Consumers rush to grab at the once-in-a-lifetime discounts and stack their carts to their limits. It is the day where one-of-a-kind sale discounts await us. Need new clothes? New kitchen utensils? New cars? Well lucky for you, it’s Black Friday!
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday always falls on the fourth Friday of November, following the Thanksgiving celebration on Thursday. On this day, shops open early, some even as early as Thanksgiving. Items are discounted in huge amounts, and prices drop to the lowest they’ve been all year. In some stores, these sales last until Monday or even the whole week, earning the name “Cyber Monday” or “Cyber Week.” These discounts can be found both online and in person, making it an enjoyable and awaited day for everyone in parts of the world that celebrate.
Since its creation, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day in the United States. Just last year, in 2022, retail sales on the day rose by a significant 12% in all categories in the United States. Although it is not an official holiday in the United States, it marks the arrival of the long-awaited, festive Christmas shopping season. This year, the National Retail Federation predicts holiday spending to increase between 7% to 9% from 2022.
The History of Black Friday
You might be thinking, how was a special day dedicated to shopping first established? There are many myths on the commencement of Black Friday; however, according to History, its true history dates back to the 1950s in Philadelphia. On the day after Thanksgiving, shoppers and tourists swarmed into the city’s streets in preparation for the annual Army-Navy football game that took place on the following Saturday. As a result, there were not only great hordes of people in the streets and stores, but also an excessive amount of traffic. It became a day where shoplifters could freely obtain merchandise, disguised by the discord and disorder within the shops. Such crimes ruined the hopes of Philly police having a day off and led numerous officers to extend their shifts, battling to enforce the law and preserve organization.
This holiday after Thanksgiving was first called “Black Friday” by a New York publication in 1951, because, as reported by the researcher Bonnie Taylor Blake, numerous workers on this day would not be present at the factories. However, because of all of the negative factors that would occur the day after Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, Philly police officers started picking on the name, “Black Friday,” in 1961. There were a couple of the city’s retailers and boosters who tried to modify the name to reduce its negative connotations, trying to change the name from “Black Friday” to “Big Friday,” but their efforts proved futile as Black Friday was finally introduced nationally in 1985. Now, Black Friday is not known as a day of chaos, but as an opportunity for America’s stores to earn significant profits.
Black Friday’s Competition
Black Friday not only consists of super hyper and vigorous shoppers, but of rivalries among brands as well. Throughout the years, retailers from multiple brands, including Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and Kohl’s, have been competing with each other to see which store would be the earliest to open on Black Friday. As explained by Barbara Khan, a marketing professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, brands would “participate in the rat race to see who could get people to run their stores first.” In fact, several of the companies listed above are known to open their stores as early as on Thanksgiving day. Instead of this holiday of shopping discounts lasting one sole day, it expanded into a five-day weekend full of fresh shopping opportunities, which begins on Thanksgiving day and concludes on Cyber Monday.
Now, Black Friday is celebrated by more than 130 countries around the world and participated in by well over 300 stores. This year, some popular stores to watch out for are Nike, Sephora, and Apple, but the list goes on for any item you’re in search of. Whether it would be the latest shoes or grocery lists that tempt you, there is a deal for everyone. Need new clothes? New kitchen utensils? New cars? Then don’t miss out—ready your list of shops to visit and prepare yourselves for the Black Friday swarm of people and of one-of-a-kind sales. And unlike Philly during Black Friday in the 1950s, try to shop safely.
