Commodity: An Acro-Septon
Cast all your cares...
Onto this last shoppin' you go.
Mind only just one thing:
Make it through the show!
Over prices you'll be passing,
Discounts bidding adieu.
It'll be your grandest procuring,
To get the back the profit "i"
You –
Yourself lost, lost while trading.
Black Friday -- Tom Sanford
In the US, Thanksgiving has been a federal holiday since 1863, celebrated at first on the last Thursday of November. Since 1932, the next day has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Though not an official holiday, almost half of the states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government employees, and many businesses and schools close on both days, extending the weekend to four days, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers, In 1939, during the Depression, president Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the fourth (rather than the last) Thursday in November so that in some years the holiday shopping period would begin a week earlier. Most major retailers open very early and stay open longer at night to offer promotional sales; in 2011, several retailers opened at midnight, and the next year Wal-Mart and others announced Black Friday would begin at 8:00 PM on the Thursday prior; in 2014, Wal-Mart began its Black Friday sales at 6:00 PM, and some of its rivals even earlier. It became common for prospective shoppers to camp out in front of the stores in an effort to secure a place in front of the line and thus a better chance at getting desired items before they ran out. It has routinely been described as the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005, but traditionally that was seldom the case; the last Saturday before Christmas has usually been the busiest, with Black Friday ranking between 5th and 10th place. However, since 2003 it has often been the busiest day, fueled by lurid stories of violence and greed. Since 2006, it has been the cause of at least 7 deaths and 98 serious injuries. In 2008, 2,000 shoppers began assembling at 8:00 PM on Thanksgiving outside a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, for the 5:00 opening on Black Friday; when the store opened they surged inside, breaking the door down and trampling an employee to death; when other employees tried to intervene, the mob refused to halt, complaining that they had waited in the cold and dark long enough, and continued to shove police officers after they arrived on the scene to try to treat the trampled man. On the same day, two people were fatally shot during an altercation at a Toys 'R' Us store in Palm Desert, California. In 2011 at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch, California, a woman with two children pepper-sprayed 20 people ahead of her in line. In 2012 two people were shot during a dispute over a parking space outside a Wal-Mart in Tallahassee, Florida. Retailers noticed that many consumers, who were too busy to shop over the Thanksgiving weekend or did not find what they were looking for, shopped for bargains online on the following Monday, so in 2005 the National Retail Federation's "Shop.org" division began promoting Cyber Monday, thus extending the shopping spree an additional day. By 2013, Cyber Monday was the busiest shopping day of the year, and retailers began extending the on-line bargains throughout the entire week.
ReplyDeleteIn American history "Black Friday" used to signify the beginning of the Panic of 1869. The government had accrued a large public debt, including the issuance of "greenbacks" which were not backed by gold but refarded as legal tender; the expectation was that they would ultimately be backed by gold. New York financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk sought to corner the gold market in order to profit from the situaton; fellow financier Abel Corbin, president Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law, persuaded Grant to appoint general Daniel Butterfield (credited with composing "Taps," the bugle-call for military burials and to signal "lights out," to the position of assistant treasurer, and Butterfield (whose father had founded American Express in 1850) accepted $10,000 in exchange for letting the conspirators know ahead of time when the government intended to sell gold so they could sell off their holdings before the price dropped. Under their manipulation, the value of gold rose 30%; however, without telling Butterfield, Grant ordered the Treasury to immediately sell $4 million worth of gold, halting the run and causing prices to drop by 18% within minutes. Butterfield was forced to resign, but he became an executive at American Express (which his father had founded in 1850) and was buried at the West Point military academy, though he had never been a cadet there. Corbin and other invetors were financially ruined. Fisk and Gould escaped significant financial harm.
ReplyDeleteThe first use of "Black Friday" to decribe the day after Thanksgiving was in 1951, when the industrial journal "Factory Management and Maintenance" referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on that day in order to get a four-day weekend. In 1961 that day was again nicknamed "Black Friday" to describe the heavy, disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic in Philadelphia on that day due to shoppers' crowd behavior, though the common (erroneous) explanation is that the day marked the point when retailers begin to turn an annual profit, going from being "in the red" to being "in the black." The "New York Ties" did not use the term until 1975, but the report still conneted it to shopping and traffic volume in Philadelphia. The term gained wider traction in the early 1980s, although as late as 1985 the "Philadelphia Inquirer" reported that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were still unaware of the term. In the UK the term "Black Friday" referred to the Friday before Christmas, when emergency services had to be ramped up to deal with the large number of people partying on that night, However, since 2001 British retailers with American origins have increasingly attempted to introduce a retail "Black Friday" there. French businesses are also holding annual "Black Friday" monster sales, even employing the English term rather than the French to "Vendredi noir." In India, the three-day Great Online Shopping Festival is held every December. In Mexico, since 2011 El Buen Fin ("the good weekend") has occurred on the November weekend prior to the Monday celebration of the Mexican Revolution; in that same year, Romanian stores also adopted the concept, but it is on the Friday before the one in the US.