The 1st Day of Patmas

On the first day of Patmas, I give to you…the History of Black Friday!

Hello, and welcome back to the 4^th annual installment of the 12 Days of Patmas!  Hopefully this year will be as entertaining as past years have been…and we make it to our 5^th anniversary (which I already have an idea for).  However, that is next year.  This year, I have a series of interesting posts lined up for you to enjoy…starting off today with the origins of my least favorite idea in the history of ideas…Black Friday!

As anyone who’s been reading this blog knows, I am a big fan of Thanksgiving, and not letting the Christmas season creep into my Thanksgiving season.  Sadly, I’m mostly alone in this crusade…and Black Friday is one of the major culprits working against me.  These days, midnight openings are no longer good enough.  Stores are opening at 8pm Thanksgiving night!  Which just seems awful.  Hell, I saw a recurring ad for J C Penny that showed a family at thanksgiving dinner singing about how it needed to end as quickly as possible so they could go shopping.  Which is sickening.

So, Black Friday is clearly a scourge on this country…but where and how did it start?  This is the subject of our first day of Patmas post.

Let’s start with the basics.  Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, often regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.  Black Friday is not a holiday, but California and some other states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday such as Columbus Day.  Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the day after off, followed by a weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers.  It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005 (although many would have you believe it’s been the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time…I guess people actually gave a shit about Thanksgiving once upon a time).

Contrary to popular belief, the name Black Friday actually didn’t originate due to this being the day when stores got back “in the black” for the year.  The day's name actually originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving.  Use of the term started before 1961 and began to see broader use outside Philadelphia around 1975.  It wasn’t until later that the alternative explanation was made: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss ("in the red") from January through November, and "Black Friday" indicates the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or "in the black".  Although this is still quite the misnomer, as stores like Walmart have a net income in the positive all year.

 

As we all have seen in the news, Black Friday should really be named as such due to how black people’s souls are on this day.  Black Friday shopping has become known for attracting aggressive crowds, with annual reports of assaults, shootings, stabbings, and throngs of people trampling on other shoppers in an attempt to get the best deal on a product before supplies run out.

Personally, I like to stay home and watch college football on Black Friday.  This year was the first ever year I went out to a mall on Black Friday.  I was there for 30 minutes, and it was a terrifying, horrible experience I never with to partake in again.

Anyways, that’s the history.  I would just like to point out that there is still an entire month of shopping days available to you between Thanksgiving and Christmas…so maybe save the DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING for your family, friends, and keeping alive the Thanksgiving spirit just a little longer before we delve into the world of unbridled consumerism and the gluttonous hyperconsumption of unnecessary goods.