Holiday:
Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving
Day in the United States, often regarded as the beginning of
the Christmas shopping season. In recent years, most major
retailers have opened extremely early and offered
promotional sales to kick off the holiday shopping season,
similar to Boxing Day sales in many Commonwealth Nations.
Black Friday is not a federal 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 news
reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described
it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer
period of time.
The day's name originated in Philadelphia, where it
originally 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.
Later an alternative explanation was made: that retailers
traditionally operated at a financial loss from January
through November, and "Black Friday" indicates the point at
which retailers begin to turn a profit, or "in the black". For large retail chains like Walmart, their
net income is positive starting from January 1, and Black
Friday can boost their year to date net profit from $14
billion to $19 billion.
For many years, it was common for retailers to open at 6:00
a.m., but in the late 2000's many had crept to 5:00 or even
4:00. This was taken to a new extreme in 2011, when several
retailers (including Target, Kohl's, Macy's, Best Buy, and
Bealls) opened at midnight for the first time. In
2012, Walmart and several other retailers announced that
they would open most of their stores at 8:00 p.m. on
Thanksgiving Day (except in states where opening on
Thanksgiving is prohibited due to blue laws, such as
Massachusetts where they still opened around midnight),
prompting calls for a walkout among some workers. Black
Friday shopping is known for attracting aggressive crowds,
with annual reports of assaults, shootings, and throngs of
people trampling on other shoppers in an attempt to get the
best deal on a product before supplies run out.
Source: Wikipedia: Black Friday (shopping) |
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