The Story Of Black Friday Shopping

How did Black Friday change into Black November?

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving, a holiday that most businesses have traditionally considered as a holiday that employees are paid for. Since most people stay in their own homes Kahn explained that stores began offering discounts on their merchandise to attract shoppers into their stores. They also offer discounts on items that cost a lot, such as televisions, appliances and electronics. “Deals must be worth getting up from your bed and heading to the nearest store — and possibly even waiting for a long time in line also,” Kahn said.

Black Friday was also originally designed to be a shopping social experience where people shop together, explained Katherine Cullen, the National Retail Federation (NRF)’s senior director of consumer and industry research. Friends and families visit stores together and, in contrast, shopping on Amazon Prime Day and Cyber Monday is a solo activity that you can perform via your phone or tablet.

In the past, retailers started competing against one another to see who would open first in the morning of Black Friday. Target, Best Buy and Kohl’s began opening their doors at the time of Thanksgiving in order to “participate in the competition to determine who can bring the most people to go to shops first” Kahn said. This resulted in Black Friday becoming what Cullen called a five-day shopping week that began on Thanksgiving and ended with Cyber Monday. The five days that followed grew into a week, then into weeks, experts declared the whole month of November “Black November.”

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What is the impact of Black Friday impacts the holiday shopping season

Even though Black Friday and Cyber Monday are entwined with the season of shopping for the holidays, Cullen emphasized that they’re not tied to each other. For instance when the NRF conducted a survey of shoppers on how much they spent over Thanksgiving weekend in 2021 it was slightly lower than the year 2000. However, the sales in the general Christmas shopping season -that according to the NRF describes as the time between November. 1 through December. 31, increased 14.1 percent year-over-year.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday can also affect the global retail calendar. Although Americans consider Black Friday and Cyber Monday with Thanksgiving, more than 20 countries, such as those in the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden and Mexico are hosting similar sales, with some utilizing the same name, despite having no Thanksgiving celebrations. Also, Black Friday shopping events worldwide are held at the exact same time. For instance, stores in Canada organize Black Friday sales on the same day they are held in the U.S.

What is the story behind how Black Friday got its name?

The phrase “Black Friday” was not originally connected with shopping, as explained by Nancy Koehn, an academic and historian from the Harvard Business School. It outlined a financial panic in 1869 which was caused by the investors Jay Gould and Jim Fisk raising the prices of gold, eventually causing the market to plunge. Since its inception in the 19th century, Koehn said the term “Black Friday” has been commonly employed to refer to other unfortunate occasions or situations, for example, workers not coming to work the day following Thanksgiving.

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