A Brief History of Black Friday

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How did Black Friday became such a big shopping day?



So retailers were always hoping for an early Thanksgiving?


Brilliant! How did that work out?


By 1941, though, the furor had died down, and Congress passed a law that made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November regardless of how it affected the shopping day that would become known as Black Friday. [Image credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.]

Why call it Black Friday?





Do retailers really need Black Friday to turn an annual profit?


Is Black Friday really the biggest shopping day of the year?



But Black Friday tells us how the holiday season will shake out, right?

Again, not necessarily. According to a 2007 Time story, even if Black Friday goes swimmingly for retailers, it doesn't really tell analysts much about how the holiday season will look. The National Retail Federation told the magazine that since the bulk of holiday shopping still occurs in the week leading up to Christmas, those days are far more important for retailers' bottom lines than Black Friday is. That week coupled with the steep discounts most retailers start offering on the day after Christmas end up determining how well the holiday season goes for retailers.

What's the story on Cyber Monday?

It's obviously a bit tough for online retailers to cash in on the retail bonanza that their brick-and-mortar counterparts enjoy on Black Friday; you can't really have a doorbuster sale when you don't have any doors to bust. In 2005, though, Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation, started promoting the Monday immediately following Black Friday as "Cyber Monday," Black Friday's tech-savvy cousin for online retailers.

So is Cyber Monday the biggest online shopping day of the year?

Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday probably isn't quite the e-commerce boom that you'd expect. According to Snopes, the first few years of Cyber Monday looked a lot like Black Friday. Sales were certainly higher than normal, but the biggest e-commerce days were still usually a couple of weeks before Christmas. Basically, online shopping's big days are governed by the same keep-putting-it-off impulse that shapes traditional retail's best revenue days, only the online jackpots come a little earlier as procrastinators have to allow for shipping time.

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November 25, 2009 - 5:35pm
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