I don't know about your part of the globe, by my teeny tiny Port Elizabeth is going cray cray right now, because some of our bigger stores are running Black Friday promotions. People have been queuing up for daysssss (exaggerating a tad bit) and I'm pretty sure the malls are jam packed right now.
It got me thinking: what's up with Black Friday?
I mean... why? We know that it originated in America.
But what does the name "Black Friday" mean? It sounds a bit racist doesn't it? (i joke i joke)
Anyways... so I Googled and cross checked my sources and dug a bit deeper and this is what I found:
Some people believe that Black Friday got it's name from American retailers who anticipated the move of profits that were "in the red" to "in the black" (after Thanksgiving). But that's not the entire story though.
Apparently the term "Black Friday" was first used in 1869 when 2 greedy financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, bought up all the nation's gold supply, in order to up it's price and sell it at a huge profit. This resulted in the market crashing and hundreds of people losing their lives savings.
The term popped up again in the 1950's in Philadelphia when police offers started using it to refer to the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of people would flood the city's shopping district before the yearly Army-Navy football game, which normally happens on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Police officers were forced to work on that day, so it has always been a pretty bleak time for them, thus dubbed "Black Friday."
The meaning of the term was remixed a bit when merchants jumped in to claim it as a day that they would run crazy specials. It was changed to "Big Friday", but that did not stick. "Black Friday" soon spread all across America and gave birth to other shopping days, such as "Cyber Monday" (same as Black Friday, but online) and Gray Thursday, where stores try to capitalize on the Thanksgiving holiday by keeping it's doors open, much to the dismay of it's workers.
