Black Friday (shopping)
| Black Friday | |
|---|---|
Black Friday shopping at a Target store in November 2008
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| Observed by |
Traditionally: United States Others: Canada, United Kingdom and increasingly many other parts of the world. |
| Type | Commercial |
| Significance | Shopping holiday |
| Celebrations | Shopping |
| Date | Day after U.S. Thanksgiving |
| 2016 date | November 25 |
| 2017 date | November 24 |
| 2018 date | November 23 |
| 2019 date | November 29 |
| Frequency | Annual |
| Related to | Thanksgiving, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, Christmas |
Black Friday (/ˈblæk ˈfraɪdeɪ/) is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States (the fourth Thursday of November). Since 1952, it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S., and most major retailers open very early (and more recently during overnight hours) and offer promotional sales. Black Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some other states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday such as Columbus Day. Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend, makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers. It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005, although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time. Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback.
In 2014, spending volume on Black Friday fell for the first time since the 2008 recession. $50.9 billion was spent during the 4-day Black Friday weekend, down 11% from the previous year. However, the U.S. economy was not in a recession. Christmas creep has been cited as a factor in the diminishing importance of Black Friday, as many retailers now spread out their promotions over the entire months of November and December rather than concentrate them on a single shopping day or weekend.
The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".
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Wikipedia