A movement away from traditional Black Friday shopping is growing in the U.S. Tidying expert Marie Kondo is also embracing “Green Friday” which emphasizes quality time, memories, and services over physical gifts. National climate reporter Chase Cain shows us how to minimize our impact on the planet this holiday season.
Millions of shoppers will hit stores across the United States on Friday for Black Friday, the unofficial kickoff of the holiday shopping season.
Retailers will offer all types of discounts and special deals to get customers in their stores, and the phenomenon will even go virtual, as stores move outside of their brick and mortar walls to attract growing numbers of shoppers.
But how did “Black Friday” come to be used to describe the day after Thanksgiving? The answer, it turns out, isn’t a simple one, and there is some disagreement over how it worked its way into the popular lexicon.
According to Britannica and numerous other outlets, the term ‘Black Friday’ was first associated with the day after Thanksgiving in the 1960s in Philadelphia. Police used the term to describe the scene as large numbers of suburban tourists came into the city to begin their holiday shopping.
Those shoppers would usually cause traffic headaches and security issues, and police would often have to work longer shifts to cope with those challenges, according to Brittanica.
“The huge crowds created a headache for the police, who worked longer shifts than usual as they dealt with traffic jams, accidents, shoplifting and other issues,” the encyclopedia said.
Some have argued that the phrase’s roots go back further than that. According to Dictionary.com, the term began to be used to describe the day after Thanksgiving in the 1950s, when factory managers called the day “Black Friday” because so many employees would call off sick the day after the holiday.
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Both publications agree however that the term came into more popular use, and began to be connected to shopping, in the 1980’s, when retailers would say that increased sales after Thanksgiving would help them go from red (operating at a deficit) into the black (operating at a profit).
Now, Black Friday sales tend to start before Thanksgiving, and while many shoppers are turning to online outlets to get their holiday lists checked off, brick-and-mortar retailers continue to play a key role in the tradition all these years later.
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