by Brian Boone
Before you brave the big box stores or the mall today, prepare yourself with this history of Black Friday — and hey, it’s free, so it’s a complete steal of a deal and totally worth waking up early to get.
Myth: As the first official day of the Christmas-focused, holiday shopping season, store traffic and sales volume are both so high that it’s the first day that most retail operations move “into the black,” or start to turn a profit for the year.
Truth: The phrase originally referred to different kinds of post-Thanksgiving traffic and retail activity. In 1960, a Philadelphia Inquirer article about Philadelphia-wide day-after-Turkey Day traffic jams coined the term “black Friday,” with black meaning “dark” or “negative.” By the time, the phrase was already in casual use in Philadelphia among the city’s workforce, used by law enforcement and retail workers to complain about the crush of stressed-out and rude people jamming the city’s streets and stores while doing their holiday shopping.
Myth: “Black Friday” has always been “Black Friday.”
Truth: As suggested in the previous paragraph, the shopping-dominating Friday after Thanksgiving didn’t have a nickname when Philadelphia’s laborers resented everything about it. But after “Black Friday” took off, the city didn’t like the negative connotation of the term, especially as it was associated with their fair city. In the 1970s, by which point the rest of America’s retail sector by and large advertised “Black Friday” deals, Philadelphia merchants conspired to call the post-Thanksgiving shopping holiday “Big Friday.”
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Myth: Retailers save their biggest sales and undeniable “doorbusters” for Black Friday.
Truth: Sometimes those deals on big screen TVs and air fryers seem too good to be true because they are. Black Friday sales, and the fliers and television commercials used to promote them, are parts of a marketing plan. Stores routinely and artificially mark up the prices of certain, highly coveted items and then slash them for Black Friday, giving the illusion of a discount. They also don’t make those Black Friday prices one-day exclusive offers. After the initial rush of holiday shopping dies down and the limited time-deals expire, stores may reinstitute those briefly instituted Black Friday deals.
Myth: Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year.
Truth: It’s unofficially the most panicked shopping day of the year because so many stores offer deals that last for just that one day or a few hours and on a limited stock of big-ticket items. But for the day after Thanksgiving to be the busiest shopping day of the year would mean that a lot of people are getting all their holiday shopping done all at once on that one day — but we’re a nation of procrastinators. On average, the busiest, most profitable, and most store-packing shopping period of the holiday season is the final Saturday before Christmas Eve — in other words, the just-about last minute.