The Origins of Black Friday
While the term "Black Friday" wasn’t coined until the 1960s, the day after Thanksgiving has been known as the official start of the Christmas shopping season since Macy’s established its Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924. The term "Black Friday" is associated with by-hand accounting practices, where red ink was used to indicate a loss and black ink to indicate a profit: holiday shopping moves retailers from the red to the black.
But "Black Friday" was popularized with a distinctly negative connotation in the minds of many. Police in the 1960s in Philadelphia griped about how congested the streets became on this day, labeling it "Black Friday" and contributing to the sense of the day’s chaotic consumerist frenzy.
Growing Crowds, Earlier Hours
Most retailers see Black Friday as an opportunity to draw large crowds and capitalize on "first mover advantage" by capturing customers before the competition. Retailers typically advertise aggressive mark-downs on so called "door-busters". Many times these door-busters are nothing more than poorly stocked loss-leaders intended to drive traffic through scarcity while (hopefully) increasing total "basket size" with other, more profitable items.
In today's 24-hour news cycle, Black Friday commands intense media coverage akin to traffic warnings on the days leading up to Thanksgiving. Retailers have become adept at taking advantage of this by offering the lowest price on a popular item or two, thereby magnifying their "share of voice" through what the industry calls "earned media".
To compete with each other, big retailers began opening earlier and earlier on Friday morning. In 2007, the average store opening was around 5am on Black Friday. By 2014, the average store opening was pulled ahead nearly 11 hours, to 6pm on Thanksgiving Day, with many referring to this shift as "Gray Thursday".
In the scramble to be seen as
the Black Friday shopping destination, stores like Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, Best Buy and
many others called their employees away from their holiday feasts and family gatherings to "man the store" for ever earlier, even crazier openings.
In 2011, a Target employee started a Change.org petition asking the store to remain closed on Thanksgiving day – and gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Many similar ones followed the next year. While the retail giant argued that some employees had volunteered to pick up the extra hours at the holiday time-and-a-half pay rate, the public was becoming increasingly aware of who the real victims were in the buying frenzy. It wasn’t the crowds who camped out, sweated, and shoved to get the last remaining DVD player at 80 percent off – it was the employees who had to sacrifice time with their families to go to work in the middle of the fray.
The Fall of Black Friday?
In recent years, both retailers and consumers have witnessed a backlash against encroaching Black Friday hours. For one, retailers are forced to offer unprofitable deals and pay employees for all those extra hours in order to compete with the box store next door, and profits on Black Friday have been disappointing in recent years even as the economy is recovering. Furthermore, many retail experts aren't convinced that opening on Thursday doesn't simply cannibalize sales that could have been made on Friday. Beyond that, it seems most shoppers besides the diehard deal hunters are simply tired of the crowds and frenzied consumerism associated with Black Friday, and are opting to shop online and even on their mobile devices while waiting in line.
Sympathy for retail employees has also played a part in the day’s waning importance. REI last month became one of the first stores to announce that they will be closed on the Friday after Thanksgiving this year, thereby foregoing one of their "top ten" days of the year. Rather, they are encouraging their customers and employees to "OptOutside" and use the day to get out into nature with their families.
GameStop, while it will be open on Friday, will not be opening at midnight once again this year, as it has in the past. Their employees will at least be able to sleep off the turkey coma before coming to work. Several other companies have also pulled back their Thanksgiving Day hours, including Staples, which pulled back its opening to 6am on Black Friday for the first time since 2011.
Others who are closed outright on Thanksgiving now include DSW Shoes, Nordstrom, Dillard's, Burlington Coat Factory, American Girl, Barnes and Noble, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Crate and Barrel, Jo-Ann Fabrics, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, Pier 1 Imports, Home Depot, Lowe's, Costco, BJ's and Sam's Club, along with retailers in Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island where they are strictly prohibited to open on Thanksgiving thanks to "blue laws" on the books, which were first drafted in the colonial era to push people to go to church on Sundays and holidays. That said, there are other retailers who are forced to open on Thanksgiving due to
rules set by shopping mall owners.