November starts and like every year the month will end celebrating one of the most anticipated shopping days of the year: Black Friday. Literally BlackFriday has its origin in the United States. It is celebrated on the first Friday after Thanksgiving , that is, the last Friday of November, where offers and great discounts are the protagonists as the start of Christmas shopping.
This celebration has crossed borders and has become a real attraction in almost the whole world as the beginning of Christmas shopping . When is Black Friday 2021 celebrated
Being celebrated the day after the American Thanksgiving Day celebration, and being the fourth Thursday of November, Black Friday takes place every year on the following Friday. This 2021 the day for its celebration is Friday, November 26.
For some years now, stores have stretched the celebration of this shopping day from a single day to several days. Black Friday has become an avalanche of people waiting at the doors of stores willing to be the first to get the best deals, a global celebration that lasts for 48 or 72 hours . However, its origin is diffuse, since there are several hypotheses about its birth.
The origin of ‘black friday’
The origin of the term seems to be that it goes back to the city of Philadelphia in the 1950s and that it was the local police who began to use it in a derogatory way, since the city became chaotic the day after Thanksgiving, for the avalanche of people who came to see the American football game between the two great military academies, which took place that Saturday. Many years passed before the term became popular throughout the country.
An attempt was made to change its name and turn it into Big Friday to soften those negative connotations, but it was unsuccessful.
Another theory quite close to the first hypothesis is the one that ensures that it was not until November 19, 1975, the day on which the New York Times first coined the adjective “black” to refer to the traffic chaos that had occurred in New York City that year due to the post-Thanksgiving day sales.
Very widespread is the story that explains that Black Friday has to do with the role of small businesses in the market. Tradition assures that, after a whole year of losses (that is, red numbers ), finally, after Thanksgiving, the Christmas season arrived, the day from which the benefits began , and with them, instead of red numbers, ” black numbers ” were produced.
Economic crisis
A third theory affirms that the first use of the term Black Friday was given, not to refer to Christmas shopping, but in relation to an economic crisis: on Friday, September 24, 1869, two Wall Street financiers , Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, after an intense work to achieve great profits, failed in their endeavor, and the market went bankrupt . For this reason, that day was named “Black Friday”.
The ‘Good End’ in Mexico
For a long time, Canadian merchants were the envy of their American colleagues, especially when their customers traveled south in search of good deals. So in Canada they started offering their own Black Friday sales, even though Thanksgiving is celebrated in Canada a month earlier.
And in Mexico , “Black Friday” is called “Buen Fin” and is associated with the anniversary of the 1910 revolution in Mexico, which sometimes coincides with Thanksgiving Day in the United States , and is celebrated during a whole weekend.
in brazil, where the Thanksgiving holiday does not exist, “Black Friday” became included in the country’s commercial calendar when merchants realized the sales potential of the day.
Santa Claus, the predecessor of Black Friday
For many Americans, the Thanksgiving Day parade organized by the Macy’s department store has become part of the ritual of this holiday. However, this event was inspired by the Canadian store Eaton’s , which held the first Santa Claus parade on December 2, 1905.
When Santa appeared at the end of the parade, it was a sign that the holiday season had begun.and, in turn, the shopping race. Other malls, such as Macy’s, inspired by the parade, began to hold similar events in the United States, and in 1924, New York saw for the first time the Macy’s parade with animals from the Central Park Zoo entirely organized by store workers. .