when you think of Black Friday you probably think of discounted prices the long lineups and the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season but the term Black Friday it wasn't always about shopping Black Friday is a term that's been in use for quite a long time to refer generally to negative events that happen to fall on a Friday that's been Zima he's a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal he says one of the big first usage of the term Black Friday was in 1869 there were a couple of investors Jay Gould and James Fisk
who cornered the gold market and it led to a financial panic and so that day in 1869 was called Black Friday there's no concrete evidence on who coined the term Black Friday or when he even started being used to describe the day after US Thanksgiving but a lot of evidence points to the 1950s the very earliest example that's been found so far by a researcher named Bonnie Taylor Blake comes from a journal a sort of a trade journal called factory management and maintenance and that goes back all the way to 1951 at the time it
refers to Black Friday as the day after Thanksgiving but it has nothing to do with shopping at that point in fact back then it has to do with worker absenteeism basically factories had trouble getting their workers to show up on the day after Thanksgiving if they got if they got the Thursday off and they would just want to take off the Friday as well this is Barney Taylor Blake the researcher Ben was referring to in her research bonnie writes that police in Philadelphia were referring to the days following Thanksgiving as Black Friday because they were
considered the biggest shopping days not only that Ben asked people to send it into the sea for the army-navy football game that happened on the Saturday local police officers would refer to this day as Black Friday because it gave them so many headaches dealing with all of that traffic but sort of foot traffic and car traffic and police had to deal with all of that so when did Black Friday become the chaotic shopping scene we see today both Ben and Bonnie say that retailers and workers didn't like the negative connotation of the term Black Friday
and even trying to rebrand it as big Friday but that's on but amidst are circulating about the origin story of Black Friday so retailers played into it there's a very common myth that has been in circulation since the 1980s pretty much that Black Friday actually refers to retail stores retail companies become profitable they go in the black and that's why they're called Black Friday's so thanks to that myth retailers were able to put a positive spin on the term and reinvent it - the Black Friday we see today and it's been so successful that we
see online retailers trying to spin off Black Friday into other shopping days so there's Cyber Monday for instance regardless of his origins Black Friday is now a popular day for retailers [Music] [Music]
