When someone says “Thanksgiving”， the image that comes to our mind is one of roasted turkey and pumpkin pies. It is also an image that is well known around the world. However, the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, could be one of the best-kept American secret traditions. Unknown to the world, but the phrase could be use as a secret signal among American shoppers.

How it got started

The Philadelphia publication named “The American Philatelist” made the earliest media mention of “Black Friday” in 1966. Its article described the departments stores and shops in Philadelphia being “mobbed from opening to closing” during what most of us thinks as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Since Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, the “Friday” part of Black Friday comes from the first shopping day available to the family after Thanksgiving, which was a Friday. (Many stores did not open on the weekend during that historical period.) The “Black” part of the term comes from the pre-computer business accounting practice of recording the income in black ink and the debts in red ink. Most people agree that “Black Friday” is the first day of the year when most retail operation turns a profit for the year during the early years of American mass retailing.

The cause of this strange accounting situation is the combination of old retail technology and consumer spending habits. After World War II, most department stores had to stockpile many types of merchandises throughout the years because of the slow ordering and fulfillment technology that made delivery of seasonal items very unpredictable. It was quite common for a department store to order Easter items before Thanksgiving, or order Christmas items starting around February. For the large regional and national department stores, the ordering took even longer because the large shipments had to be broken down into smaller shipments to be re-shipped to their regional stores from a central receiving warehouse. Once the ordered item arrived at the local department store, they would sit in the storage for many months before they were displayed and available for purchase. Because of the long wait between ordering and selling, many department stores had to pay for the items in advance and wait to recover the cost when they sell the item later. This delay would cause the merchants to be ‘in the red’, that is, owing money, for the first nine months of the year. So Black Friday comes to mean salvation if the store could make be ‘in the back’, that is, sell enough merchandise to cover the cost, or doom if the store stayed ‘in the red.’

In addition to the supply side of the equation, most consumers lacked the easy-credit we enjoy today. The expensive luxury item had to be purchased with cash all at once, or with a monthly payment program called ‘layaway’, if the merchant trusted you. Because of the large price tag of many luxury items, most people did not have enough cash on hand to buy them thorough out the year. (If you want to get a sense of this dilemma, read “The Gift of the Magi” by the American short story writer O’Henry.) While this may seem strange to us today, this was a common problem during the time when the banks still offered a special savings program called “The Christmas Club” that date back to the Great Depression. This program allowed people to make small amount of weekly deposit into a special saving account. Right before Christmas, people would close out the Christmas Club account and buy their Christmas presents with this large amount of saving, and Black Friday would be the starting day until Christmas for people to find the prefect present.

In the earliest Black Friday records, the merchants did not use discounts or coupons for their Black Friday event. That day wasn’t even marked as a sales day. It was simply a really busy shopping day after Thanksgiving. People flocked to department stores because the stores only had limited quantity of merchandises. Once those merchandises were gone, there were no more to be had for another year. The shoppers flocked and mobbed the store in order to get what they wanted. So the earliest Black Friday phenomenon was causes not by merchants discounting items but natural scarcity of merchandise. This drove people to the downtown department stores in an era where most people did not own their own vehicles, so the bus drivers and cab drivers also called the day after Thanksgiving ‘Black Friday’ because of the frustration and headache that the holiday sales caused them. People would spill out into the sidewalk; whole city street would be clogged with cabs, busses, and pedestrians with endless bags in their arms.

While “Black Friday” has been touted as “the busiest shopping day of the year,” it is not the case. The busiest shopping day of the year is the Saturday before Christmas when all the last minute shoppers makes a mad dash to buy something at full price for that special someone they put off to the last minute to shop for.

(To Be Continued…)