Black Friday Date in the current year: November 29, 2024

Black Friday The Friday following Thanksgiving Day is widely known as Black Friday not only in the United States where it originated, but in many other parts of the world. It marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Black Friday used to be a typically American phenomenon, but lately it has been promoted by retailers in many other countries that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

For centuries, the term “Black Friday” was associated with Fridays when something bad happened such as the gold panic of 1869, when the Treasury released a large supply of gold to stop a conspiracy to corner the gold market, causing gold prices to crash. As a result, fortunes were lost and made in a single day of September 24, 1869; for those who lost everything, it was indeed a Black Friday.

The Friday after Thanksgiving was first referred to as “Black Friday” in the November 1951 issue of Factory Management and Maintenance. However, the author of the article meant the practice of not showing up for work on the day after Thanksgiving by calling in sick to get a four-day-weekend rather than the post-Thanksgiving shopping craze. This use of the expression failed to catch on.

Around the same time, the police in some localities started using the term “Black Friday” to describe the heavy traffic and crowds associated with the start of the Christmas shopping season. The use of the expression spread slowly but steadily; eventually retailers appropriated the term, and today it has a more positive meaning.

At first, Black Friday was all about traditional shopping at retail stores. For many years, it was common for stores to open at 4 a.m. – 6 a.m. on Black Friday. Today, many retailers begin their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving and remain open overnight and then some, until late Friday evening.

When online shopping became common, Black Friday began to spread beyond the United States. This happened because U.S.-based retailers offered Black Friday discounts to shoppers, and retailers outside of the United States started to offer their own discounts and promote Black Friday sales to remain competitive.

Black Friday is not a federal holiday, but in some states “The Day After Thanksgiving” is a non-working holiday for state government employees, as well as a day off in schools. Besides, many non-retail employers across the United States give their employees an extra day off after Thanksgiving because a lot of people travel visit their families out of state and can’t be at work on Friday anyway.

The shopping craze doesn’t stop when black Friday is over, by the way. The Saturday after Thanksgiving is known as Small Business Saturday; it was created to support small businesses that tend to be overshadowed by big box retail stores on Black Friday. The Monday after Thanksgiving is Cyber Monday; it focuses specifically on online shopping.

Some people don’t like the hyper-consumerism of Black Friday; to counter it, they promote Buy Nothing Day, a campaign against consumerism that is usually held on Black Friday in the United States and on the Saturday after Thanksgiving elsewhere.

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Unofficial Holidays

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Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Christmas shopping season, sales, the day after Thanksgiving