Happy Black Friday?

Ya, I don't get it either. I'm reminded of some medieval dark day when the plague hit but alas it's a sale! For us Canadians we have Boxing day. That at least makes sense, you box up your old gifts or box up the gifts you intend to return, but Black Friday? Why so morbid? Maybe it's because people get shot... it is the U S of A, things like that happen in line ups. And they do line up, often the day before as they digest copious amounts of Turkey, fixin's and the rest of the excesses of such a holiday. And you know what? My guess wasn't far off... read below from Wikipedia.com (online encyclopedia):

The earliest uses of "Black Friday" refer to the heavy traffic on that day, an implicit comparison to the extremely stressful and chaotic experience of Black Tuesday (the 1929 stock-market crash) or other black days. The earliest known references to "Black Friday" (in this sense) are from two newspaper articles from November 29, 1975, that explicitly refer to the day's hectic nature and heavy traffic. The first reference is in an article entitled "Army vs. Navy: A Dimming Splendor," in The New York Times:

Philadelphia police and bus drivers call it "Black Friday" - that day each year between Thanksgiving Day and the Army-Navy game. It is the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year in the Bicentennial City as the Christmas list is checked off and the Eastern college football season nears conclusion.

The derivation is made even more explicit in an Associated Press article entitled "Folks on Buying Spree Despite Down Economy," which ran in the Titusville Herald on the same day:

Store aisles were jammed. Escalators were nonstop people. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season and despite the economy, folks here went on a buying spree. . . . . "That's why the bus drivers and cab drivers call today 'Black Friday,'" a sales manager at Gimbels said as she watched a traffic cop trying to control a crowd of jaywalkers. "They think in terms of headaches it gives them."

Both articles have a Philadelphia dateline, suggesting the term may have originated in that area.




WOW what fun... enjoy the day... I think?