The History of Black Friday
In the United States, the Friday after Thanksgiving Day is known as Black Friday. On Black Friday, many retailers offer heavily advertised bargains and open early (often as early as midnight[2]) or on Thanksgiving Day. Since at least 2005, Black Friday has been the largest shopping day of the year in the United States. It's one of the biggest shopping days of the year, and it's known for sending Christmas consumers into a frenzy, but do you know how it all began?
Its origin
Most people believe it got its moniker as a consequence of merchants' profit margins finally turning positive (profit) after a year of losses (debt). While it's true that shops used red and black to record their debts and earnings in the past, this account of Black Friday's genesis is incorrect.
On September 24, 1869, two unscrupulous Wall Street stockbrokers called Jay Gould and Jim Fisk devised a scheme to buy up as much of the country's gold as possible and sell it for a big profit. On that fateful Friday, this vicious scheme came crashing down, leading the stock market to fall and the affluent and poor alike to become bankrupt.
So, how did the term "day after Thanksgiving" come to be connected with it? You may thank the Canadians for that. Eaton's, a Canadian department store, was the first to hold a Thanksgiving Day parade in 1905. This procession inspired the now-famous Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, which originally took place in 1924 to commemorate the store's prosperity during the Roaring Twenties. The procession boosted morale and helped improve sales the next day, with shops unanimously deciding to postpone their Christmas promotions until this time.
People began calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving in the early 1950s, both to extend their holiday and to take advantage of the fact that businesses were open, thanks to a law implemented in 1941 that designated Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.
Rather than causing an HR nightmare by having to figure out who was truly sick and who was just playing hooky, many managers decided to add a paid holiday to the Friday after Thanksgiving. This trend quickly caught on, and many individuals took advantage of the additional day to get an early start on their holiday shopping.
The Friday following Thanksgiving had officially been linked with shopping at this point, but the true origins of Black Friday may be traced back to the Philadelphia Police Department. The word was coined unofficially by Philadelphia officers in the mid-1950s to characterize the chaos generated by crowds of suburban shoppers flocking to the city.
These consumers were causing traffic jams and pollution, while shoplifters were taking advantage of the confusion by fleeing with stolen items while businesses were overloaded and in pandemonium. As a result, the cops were unable to take the day off and were forced to work extra long hours in order to maintain control of the situation.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, an estimated 174 million US customers would shop online or in stores, spending an average of $520 per person. Retailers in the United Kingdom forecast that Britons will spend £7 billion on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
What is the meaning of the name "Black Friday"?
In the 1960s, the phrase "Black Friday" (in the retail sense) was established to commemorate the start of the Christmas shopping season. Back when accounting records were maintained by hand and red ink signified a loss and black ink represented a profit, “black” referred to shops shifting from the “red” to the “black.” The Friday following Thanksgiving has been recognized as the unofficial start to a busy holiday shopping season since the beginning of the contemporary Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924.
Some statistics
Online sales for Black Friday 2020 (Thanksgiving plus Black Friday) were $14.13 billion. That works up to $9.03 billion on Black Friday and $5.1 billion for Thanksgiving. This is a 19% increase over the previous year.
Shoppers spent an average of $311.75 on holiday goods throughout the five-day Thanksgiving weekend of 2020. That's down from the $361.80 average in 2019, but online with the $313.29 average in 2018.
Online sales for Black Friday 2019 (Thanksgiving plus Black Friday) were $11.9 billion. That works up to $7.5 billion on Black Friday and $4.4 billion for Thanksgiving. That's a 20.2 percent rise from the year before.
Online sales for Black Friday 2017 (Thanksgiving Day plus Black Friday) were $7.9 billion. That works up to $5.03 billion on Black Friday and $2.87 billion for Thanksgiving. This year's spending is up 17.9% over the previous year.
Online sales for Black Friday 2018 (Thanksgiving Day plus Black Friday) were $9.9 billion. This equates to $6.2 billion on Black Friday and $3.7 billion on Thanksgiving. This is a 19.7% increase over 2017.
Thanksgiving weekend in 2020 attracted 186.4 million consumers in the United States. This was down 1.7 percent from the same weekend in 2019, when 189.6 million Americans went shopping.
Online challenges for retailers
Some online retailers spend a lot of money on marketing initiatives in order to increase sales and traffic to their websites. However, they frequently overlook the heavy loads that their websites would face. Retail Gazette reports that "A number of large retailers' websites fell down in 2017 due to a lack of capacity to handle the spike in Black Friday traffic.
This just serves to emphasize the fact that some shops have failed to take the essential precautions in advance of Black Friday. Failure to plan for peak can result in poor performance, downtime, and revenue loss for merchants ". Such carelessness has a significant negative impact on one's reputation.
Know more about how to prepare your online store for Black Friday to get the most AOV out of it in this article.
Some incidents
In 2016, Demond Cottman, 21, was shot and died outside a Macy's shop in New Jersey about 1:00 a.m. on Friday. The shooter fired many bullets, leaving a bullet-riddled SUV, but his intentions are unknown. Cottman's younger brother, who is 26 years old, was also hurt. One guy was hurt in a gunshot at the Wolfchase Galleria Mall in Memphis, Tennessee. Derrick Blackburn, 19, was later charged with unauthorized firearm possession.
In 2018, Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. was shot and killed by a security officer at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Alabama, after two persons were injured in a shooting. The shooter was not Bradford, according to the police, although he was involved in the incident.
In 2019, In the food court of the Destiny USA mall in Syracuse, New York, a brawl resulted in a gunshot. The mall was put on lockdown until shoppers and employees were freed about 8:00 p.m., with all shopping activity halted. For shooting the victim twice in the leg, Kyree Truax, 21, was arrested and charged with second-degree assault, second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm, and second-degree reckless endangerment.
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