This year, Black Friday comes on November 26; a day after Thanksgiving, when several stores, both virtual and physical, begin their “Black Friday” specials to lure customers in with huge discounts.
Since President George Washington declared Thursday, November 26, 1789, to be an official holiday of “sincere and humble thankfulness,” on October 3, 1789, Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving. The traditional Thanksgiving holiday is now observed annually on the fourth Thursday in November thanks to President Abraham Lincoln, who declared it a national holiday in 1863.
Thanksgiving and Black Friday have become synonymous since the middle of the 20th century. The Friday following Thanksgiving, when consumers in the US were treated with significant product discounts, has now spread to most of the rest of the world, including India, where e-commerce firms like Amazon and Flipkart begin their unique promotions.
What is Black Friday?
After Thanksgiving, there is a shopping weekend known as Black Friday, which is mostly used for pre-Christmas and post-Thanksgiving shopping. On this day, buyers might find appealing bargains at both online and brick-and-mortar retailers.
Black Friday is described as “the day after Thanksgiving in the US, the first day of traditional Christmas shopping, when retailers make special bargains to entice shoppers” in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries.
The Friday following Thanksgiving is referred to as “in Friday when shops cut the price of items in order to attract customers who want to begin their Christmas shopping,” according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
It is thought that Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s, when police officers complained about one Friday when the streets were jam-packed with traffic, is where the name “Black Friday” first appeared. It was referred to as “Black Friday”. Alternatively, it may represent the 1869 fall of the US gold market.
According to a post just on Oxford University Press (OUP) blog, scholars at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) discovered the term’s earliest evidence, which dates it to 1610. According to the article, Halloween or shopping played very little a part in the first Black Friday. The first such Friday was a term used in schools to describe every Friday that an exam was scheduled for, rather than a specific Friday.
How long ago was Black Friday renamed “the Friday after Thanksgiving”?
The term Black Friday first appeared with in context of retail in the 1960s. In those days, when accounting was done by hand, “red” represented losses and “black” represented profits.
Additionally, the Thanksgiving Day Parade, that was first held by the US department store Macy’s on the Fridays following Thanksgiving in 1924, enhanced the link here between particular Friday and the start of the holiday shopping season. Thanksgiving and Black Friday online marketplaces in us were over $9.9 billion in 2018, according to Adobe Analytics.
While sales decreased year over year in the US, they increased in the majority of EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and APAC markets, according to the online advertising firm Criteo, which examined about 3 billion transactions from more than 5,500 retailers in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific (APAC) in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 2020.
Nevertheless, according to the firm, there was no appreciable shift in Black Friday sales from the previous year. Additionally, Criteo reports that sales were up 17% globally year over year in the first three weeks of November 2020. The truth is that this year’s “…one day event developed into a considerably extended sales period. Due to sales occurring earlier than ever this year, it may also contribute to explain the modest decline in the US.
Criticism
Some individuals view Black Friday as a sign of wasteful consumption since it encourages the purchase of unnecessary goods. On exactly a decade ago, campaigners in France demonstrated against Amazon, claiming that the company was contributing to global warming due to its lightning-fast shipping practises. Amazon was the first major retailer to provide Black Friday deals to the European market.
Former French environment minister Delphine Batho introduced a waste minimization bill at about this time that included a “Stop Black Friday” amendment. A two-year prison sentence and a fine of 300,000 Euros were proposed as penalties for participating in “aggressive commercial activities,” which would include “Black Friday” advertising.
