What is Black Friday? How Black Friday originated and what it means for the tech world
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is widely considered the start of the holiday shopping season. The term Black Friday gained popularity in the early 2000s through its use on websites for online sales that were intended to compete with sales in physical stores. As the term spread across the country via the internet, traditional retailers officially adopted the term as well as their way of attracting as many buyers as possible by offering deep discounts.
What Does Black Friday Mean?
In the United States Thanksgiving Day is the fourth Thursday of November. The next day is Black Friday which is the most popular shopping holiday of the year, with many retailers or retailers ordering the year’s deepest and best selling discounts for any given day.
Starting in 2013 and 2014, an increasing number of retailers began to move backwards on the timing of their Black Friday deals from early Friday morning to Thanksgiving Day night as a way to extend the most popular shopping day of the year. Some retailers have gone a step further, starting Black Friday sales on the Monday before Thanksgiving Day.
In 2019, Black Friday falls on ( 29 November 2019 ).
Read: Black Friday: 50% discount on all themes on the Monster template
History and Origin of Black Friday
The use of the name Black Friday to refer to the day after Thanksgiving reportedly began in Philadelphia in the 1950s. At the time, police officers in the city used the term internally to refer to the large crowds of pedestrians and vehicles that crowded the Philadelphia shopping district each year on that day. Crowds of people and cars result in accidents and often violence that require every officer to be on duty to maintain order and manage chaos. The first published use of the term Black Friday was in a 1966 advertisement by a rare stamp dealer named Earl Apfelbaum located in Philadelphia. However, the term remained largely regional until the early 2000s, with some increasing use in the 1980s in other areas.
Initially, retailers rejected the name “Black Friday” because the black days of the week have historically been used to describe negative events. Some examples are:
- Black Monday, October 19, 1987: The biggest one-day decline in stock market history, when the Dow Jones index fell 22 percent.
- Black Thursday, October 24, 1929: Stock market crash has historically been seen as the start of the Great Depression.
- Black Friday, September 24, 1869: The original Black Friday was the fall of the US gold market. At that time, gold was one of the main trading markets, with investors of all income levels – most of whom went bankrupt.
In an attempt to move away from a negative relationship with black days of the week, retailers are creating new stories for Black Friday. In accounting, business losses are traditionally recorded in red ink and gains or gains are recorded in black ink. Many retailers will find themselves “in the red” in the fall but will be pushed back “into the black” in the holiday shopping season. To create a more positive relationship with Black Friday, retailers are using this example as the meaning behind why Black Friday is called “Black Friday.” Eventually, this meaning stuck and was more popular among buyers than it was in the 1950s and is the origin of the term.
Online Shopping and Black Friday Offers
Now that you know what Black Friday is all about, now you should try to take the opportunity to get big discounts on online shopping. The most popular Black Friday deals often center around selling items for consumer electronics such as TVs, computers, tablets and game systems. While some shoppers are willing to queue for hours for many opportunities, more and more shoppers are choosing to avoid large numbers of people shopping physically and then shopping online instead. In response, retailers are now offering online shoppers many of their Black Friday offers that start at the same time as the in-store sale. In addition, stores that offer a limited number of door-buster deals can also offer different door-buster deals exclusively to online shoppers.
The desire to avoid long lines and crammed crowds also paved the way for Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately after Black Friday and is dedicated to online shoppers, with special offers available as often as every hour on several shopping sites.
The newest addition to the holiday shopping season set on special deal days is Green Monday. Green Monday is the second Monday in December and aims to catch shoppers in both physical stores and online shops who still have big gifts and discounts to buy.
Read: Buy Cheap Hosting and Themes on Black Friday 2019 [Best Deals]
And that’s a complete explanation of what Black Friday is and the complete history of black friday. Hopefully this article was useful for you and happy hunting for big discounts on Black Friday.
