What is Black Friday?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Just the biggest shopping day of the year…Dah!

But seriously, this is for those of us who don’t know nor understand what Black Friday is and why is it called Black Friday?

My wife used to be one of those who would get up at 4am, grab her coupons and shopping list, get her coffee and shoot out the door. She planned this day like General George Patton planning an invasion into Normandy. Here’s a short video of my wife getting ready fro Black Friday.

I didn’t mind, because it gave me a nice quiet day all to myself. I could eat the left overs, watch football, and just relax…until she got home. Than it was lugging everything that she bought into the house and sorting through all those bags. Whose present went to whose pile and that took hours. I’m tired just writing about it. Those memories are vividly planted into my mind.

Black Friday actually goes all the way back to 1960′s, when retailers would kick start their holiday shopping season off by offering incredible buys to shoppers. There was one stipulation, you had to get in there real early or you missed out. These offers were open to only a very small limited window of opportunity, and it made it all the more interesting if you opened your store extremely early to get them. They wanted to get the jump on their competition.

This would bring in customers by the droves and get the store owners off and running in the black, right from the get go, of the holiday shopping season. Thus the name, Black Friday.

We have evolved from those days of the sixties, and since we have more and more people shopping online, letting their fingers do the walking across their keyboards, and using the internet to do all their shopping. They have a day for them also and it’s called cyber Monday.

You can get special deals on cyber Monday, for all you web surfers, that only shop online. This is really picking up a lot of momentum, because we have more and more people doing their shopping online, and it also helps the retailers. They don’t have to carry all these items in their stores, but in a warehouse, and just ship them directly to the customer. They save money and pass that savings onto the customer, and everyone is happy.

As a matter of fact, lots of these types of deals, can’t be had in the stores, they are only available to those online shoppers.

My wife has since taken a different approach at shopping for Christmas and what Black Friday is all about. Certainly the economy has played a huge roll in her shopping, but she isn’t as young and enthusiastic as she once was either. Fighting those crowds, waiting in all those long lines, just doesn’t have the same thrill and appeal as it once did.

I hope Black Friday is the start to putting all those retailers in the black, because I know one thing, all this holiday stuff, usually means it’s the beginning of me going in the red.

Happy shopping everyone.