Black Friday was born as a negative term, got spun positive, and remained little-used for more than a decade before exploding, according to the newsobserver.com. “Today, it’s everywhere and everyone who watches a TV or picks up a newspaper in
Black Friday was born as a negative term, got spun positive, and remained little-used for more than a decade before exploding, according to the newsobserver.com.
“Today, it’s everywhere and everyone who watches a TV or picks up a newspaper in November knows the day following Thanksgiving is Black Friday,” said Rick Romell in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report.
Some of the connotations associated with Black Friday — such as the one-day shopping frenzy puts stores “in the black” — are not what most people think, Romell said.
Bonnie Taylor-Black, neuroscience researcher at the University of North Carolina suggests the “Black Friday” tag may have originated with police in Philadelphia, who each year faced massive headaches as fans in town for the Army-Navy football game combined with swarms of holiday shoppers to create a traffic-clogging mess.
Taylor-Blake found the earliest published reference to the shopping day following Thanksgiving as Black Friday was in 1961, the article describing the situation in Philadelphia and how merchants tangled with the condition as a public relations problem.
Philadelphia merchants hated the term, but as the expression spread outward from Pennsylvania, the industry embraced it and the term came to be linked to profits — not problems.
The media used the term very seldom during the 90s, and it was not until around 2004 or 2005 that the term hit critical mass.
Taylor-Blake, utilizing searches of databases of news outlets found the trend had risen from about 20 “big city” newspapers using the term in 2002 to about 350 papers, from the same sampling, using the term last year.
Trampling and grappling incidents for bargain-priced items — in particular, the 2008 death of a Walmart worker in New York stampeded by bargain hunters — probably helped seal the day as “Black Friday.”
• Dennis Fujimoto, photographer and staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 253) or dfujimoto@ thegardenisland.com.
