Yahoo Finance Now I Get It: Black Friday
Last year, 87 million Americans woke up the Friday after Thanksgiving, shook off their turkey-comas, and headed to the mall. Why? To get their hands on the door-buster deals retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT), Target (TGT) ,and Best Buy (BBY) offer on Black Friday, of course.
Black Friday has become a holiday of its own in the U.S., and we’re all familiar with the images of stampeding shoppers fighting to grab $125 big-screen TVs.
The day after Thanksgiving has long been the official start of the holiday shopping season for retailers. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier in order to allow for a longer shopping season—and a bigger boost to the economy.
Most people think that Black Friday got its name because it’s the day when retailers make a profit for the year and go from being in the red to in the black.
But retailers should be making profits during every quarter of the year—if they don’t they could be in real trouble. The real Black Friday explanation is a little more nuanced. The first mainstream use of the term was in the 1950s when workers called in sick the Friday after Thanksgiving to get four days off in a row.
In the 1960s, police departments started referring to the days following Thanksgiving as Black Friday and Black Saturday because of the headache caused by traffic jams and accidents, crowded sidewalks, and mobbed stores. Newspapers picked up on the lingo, and the phrase caught on despite retailers’ best efforts to re-brand the day as the more positive “Big Friday.”
Eventually, retailers embraced the idea and started opening earlier and earlier, and advertising limiting quantity lured potential customers into their stores for door-busting sales. Since 2002, Black Friday and the Saturday before Christmas have gone head-to-head as the biggest shopping days of the year.
But of course, there’s also been a backlash. Since 2006, there have been seven deaths and 98 injuries caused by the chaos that Black Friday sales bring.
Some argue that we’ve lost the meaning of Thanksgiving as a day about enjoying time with family and friends and not about bargain-hunting.
Companies like REI have decided not to open at all on the day, choosing instead to encourage employees to spend time with family and friends and enjoying the outdoors.
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The Internet has also played a big role in the decline of Black Friday. In recent years, online retailers such as Amazon (AMZN) began offering big deals on “Cyber Monday,” the first back-to-work Monday, to rival Friday’s brick-and-mortar deals. And it appears to be catching on. In 2014, Cyber Monday sales increased by 17% to $2.04 billion, while Black Friday sales decreased by 11% to $50.9 billion.
As a result, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, like Wal-Mart, are now offering Cyber Monday deals as well.
So whether you plan on heading to the mall this Friday or not, at least you can say that when it comes to Black Friday: Now I Get It.
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