"Black Friday" (day after Thanksgiving), 1951Bonnie Taylor-Blake taylor-blake at NC.RR.COM
Wed Aug 5 00:33:32 UTC 2009Here's another early (post-WWII) use of "Black Friday" to denote the day after Thanksgiving.
It's difficult to determine how widespread this 1951/1952 usage was or whether it was just a humorous attempt by an associate editor of *Factory Management and Maintenance* to describe the day after Thanksgiving, a day known for worker absenteeism, but I offer it as a data point. (It's also a little tough to know whether this is related to -- or perhaps whether it influenced -- Philadelphians' "Black Friday," a term used at least as early as the mid-1960s to describe that hectic, headache-filled day of shopping that followed Thanksgiving. See link, far below.)
-- Bonnie------------------------------
WHAT TO DO ABOUT "FRIDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING"
"Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis" is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that's the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the "Black Friday" comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick -- and can prove it.
What to do? Many companies have tried the standard device of denying Thanksgiving Day pay to employees absent the day before and after the holiday. Trouble is, you can't deny pay to those legitimately ill. But what's legitimate? Tough to decide these days of often miraculously easy doctors' certificates.
Glenn L. Martin, Baltimore aircraft manufacturer has another solution: When you decide you want to sweeten up the holiday kitty, pick Black Friday to add to the list. That's just what Martin has done. Friday after Thanksgiving is the company's seventh paid holiday.
We're not suggesting more paid holidays just to get out of a hole. But, if you can make a good trade in bargaining, there are lots of worse things than having a holiday on a day that was half holiday anyway. Shouldn't cost too much for that reason, either.
[From M.J. Murphy's "Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives," *Factory Management and Maintenance* 109(11), 137, November 1951. Murphy was the Industrial Relations Editor for the magazine; *Factory Management and Maintenance* was published in New York City.]
(Murphy again used "Black Friday" in his column for the February, 1952, issue [p. 133]: "November FACTORY [page 137] told of one company's solution
to heavy Friday-after-Thanksgiving absenteeism. The company added "Black Friday" to its list of paid holidays."]
"Black Friday," 1966:
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Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving), 1961Bonnie Taylor-Blake b.taylorblake at GMAIL.COM
Thu May 5 00:36:53 UTC 2011I find the following particularly helpful because it not only represents the (so far) earliest sighting of "Black Friday" used with respect to the day after Thanksgiving, but it also underscores that "Black Friday" was commonly used by Philadelphia police officers and not merchants. Moreover, it reveals a concerted, though ultimately failed effort by downtown merchants and a Philadelphia city official to change the name of that post-Thanksgiving shopping day because of consumers' association of "black" with misfortune and disaster.
This reinforces the suspicion that sometime well after 1961 some group launched an effort to rehabilitate "Black Friday," an expression that just wouldn't go away, by claiming an association with black ink (i.e., signifying profitability). It's this upbeat (though false) black-ink explanation that has stuck.
-- Bonnie[From *Public Relations News*, 18 December 1961, p. 2. This weekly newsletter was published by Denny Griswold of 815 Park Avenue, New York, NY.]
Santa has brought Philadelphia stores a present in the form of "one of the biggest shopping weekends in recent history." At the same time, it has again been proven that there is a direct relationship between sales and public relations.
For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country's most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday.
The media cooperated in spreading the news of the beauty of Christmas-decorated downtown Philadelphia, the popularity of a "family-day outing" to the department stores during the Thanksgiving weekend, the increased parking facilities, and the use of additional police officers for guaranteeing a free flow of traffic ... Rosen reports that business over the weekend was so good that merchants are giving downtown Philadelphia "a starry-eyed new look."
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‘Black Friday' Originally Meant Something Much, Much Darker[/size]
By Maxwell Strachan
Posted: 11/27/2013 - The Huffington PostIt’s totally understandable if you think the term “Black Friday” is a direct linguistic descendent of “
in the black,” accounting jargon for turning a profit. After all, the day after Thanksgiving is now one of the
biggest shopping days of the year, an annual delight to retailers hoping to give their bottom lines a nice little boost in the year’s final weeks.
But the truth is that Black Friday owes its name to the
Philadelphia Police Department, which did not have profitability in mind. One thing to remember is that, long before the rest of us started calling it Black Friday, retailers hoped to start the holiday shopping season with a bang by offering “can’t miss” deals right after Thanksgiving. (Note:
These days, “holiday shopping season” can begin way before Turkey Day.) People being people, they have long stormed stores, caused traffic jams and been generally terrible to one another in an effort not to miss these deals.
In the middle years of the twentieth century, the scene was often particularly bad in Philadelphia,
where the annual Army-Navy football game was regularly played on the weekend after Thanksgiving.
Lots of cars, lots of traffic, lots of chaos. Sound familiar?
So at
some point in the 1950s or 1960s -- some put the date exactly at 1966 -- the Philadelphia Police Department started to refer to the day after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday,” with the unrealistic hope that people would find the whole shebang distasteful and opt out of the collective consumer madness. At a minimum, it was a derisive way to describe an unpleasant day in the life of a Philly cop.
“It was not a happy term.”
retail scholar Michael Lisicky told CBS Philly in 2011. “The stores were just too crowded, the streets were crowded, the buses and the police were just on overcall and extra duty.”
The term took off in a big way, but not for the reasons the cops hoped. By the 1980s,
the idea gained steam that “Black Friday” was named after retailers trying to hop into the black, according to The Telegraph.
Then, somewhere along the way, Corporate America joyfully co-opted the phrase for their own purposes.
For at least a while, some remembered the cops’ reasoning. But by 1975,
when a sales manager said it was “bus drivers and cab drivers” that call it Black Friday because of the traffic, it was clear the police were not getting credit where credit was due.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/27/black-friday-origin_n_4346347.htmlAlso,
Black FridayClaim: The term "Black Friday" originated with the practice of selling off slaves on the day after Thanksgiving.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/holidays/thanksgiving/blackfriday.asp
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