Barbie black friday deals other uses, see Black Friday. Black Friday is a colloquial term for the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States. It traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season in the United States.
Occurring on the fourth Friday in November unless November 1st is a Friday, Black Friday has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States since 2005. For centuries, the adjective “black” has been applied to days upon which calamities occurred. The earliest known use of “Black Friday” to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurred in the journal, Factory Management and Maintenance, for November 1951, and again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, in order to have a four-day week-end. However, this use does not appear to have caught on.
The use of the phrase spread slowly, first appearing in The New York Times on November 29, 1975, in which it still refers specifically to “the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year” in Philadelphia. Since the early 21st century, there have been attempts by U. Black Friday” to other countries around the world. Retailers outside the US have attempted to promote the day to remain competitive with US-based online retailers. In more recent decades, global retailers have adopted the term and date to market their own holiday sales. The day after Thanksgiving has been regarded as the beginning of the United States Christmas shopping season since 1952. The practice may be linked with the idea of Santa Claus parades.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Santa or Thanksgiving parades were sponsored by department stores. Thanksgiving’s relationship to Christmas shopping led to controversy in the 1930s. Retail stores would have liked to have a longer shopping season, but no store wanted to break with tradition and be the one to start advertising before Thanksgiving. For this reason, in 1939, President Franklin D. Black Friday in July” deals on what they called “Prime Day”, promising better deals than on Black Friday. Amazon repeated the practice in 2016 and 2017, and other companies began offering similar deals.
Analyst Marshal Cohen of The NPD Group claimed in 2020 that Black Friday is declining in favor of online shopping, and that the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated this process. For many years, retailers pushed opening times on Black Friday earlier and earlier, eventually reaching midnight, before opening on the evening of Thanksgiving. In 2009, Kmart opened at 7 P. Thanksgiving in order to allow shoppers to avoid Black Friday traffic and return home in time for dinner with their families. Two years later, a number of retailers began opening at 8 P.