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  • 2013-11-30 (xsd:date)
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  • How Did 'Black Friday' Get Its Name? (en)
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  • Black Friday is the (originally derisive, now mainstream) term for the phenomenon that takes place in the U.S. on the day after Thanksgiving Thursday, when millions of consumers who get the day off from work or school crowd into stores for what is traditionally considered the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. The origins of the term Black Friday have become somewhat obscured in the mists of time, however, leading people to invent fanciful explanations for how that phrase became attached to the day after Thanksgiving. One example posits that the term started with a tradition of slaveowners or slave traders using that day as an opportunity for selling their wares: The use of Black Friday as a descriptor for the day after Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the selling of slaves, though, and the term didn't originate until nearly a century after the practice of slavery was abolished in the U.S. The earliest known use of Black Friday in such a context stems from 1951 and referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving in order to have four consecutive days off (because that day was not yet commonly offered as a paid day off by employers): By 1961 the term Black Friday (and Black Saturday as well) was being commonly used in a derisive sense by Philadelphia police, who had to deal with the mayhem and headaches caused by all the extra pedestrian and vehicular traffic created by hordes of shoppers heading for the city's downtown stores on the two days after Thanksgiving: In a 1994 article, former Philadelphia Bulletin reporter Joseph P. Barrett recalled how he took part in popularizing the term Black Friday throughout Philadelphia in the early 1960s, from which it eventually spread into nationwide usage: One popular alternative explanation for the origins of Black Friday is that it is the day on which retailers finally began to show a profit for the year (in accounting terms, moving from being in the red to in the black) after operating at an overall loss from January through mid-November: However, the earliest known use of this accounting-related explanation for the origins of the term Black Friday dates from 1981, many years after Philadelphia police had been using the phrase in reference to traffic issues. (en)
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