In all the hoopla around Black Friday, some people think they know why it’s called such. Or maybe they don’t. History is fascinating, and podcast host Adam Weeks gives us the story behind it.
Black Friday sounds bad
So Black Friday has a long history that has nothing to do with shopping. There was the term, black Friday was used in some bad things such as stock market crashes such as the plague, different issues. There was the day after Thanksgiving, people would often call in sick because they just wanted to take that Friday off as well. In modern history as a marketing term started about in the eighties and the notion was that essentially Black Friday was the day that retail stores actually started making a profit.
So if you think back to your classes of finance or doing the books, when you do not make money, when you are losing money, it is red. When you are making money, it is black. So hence Black Friday, which is mostly true. It’s a little bit of a folklore of how true that is and I,m sure it is different for different retail outlets, but essentially that’s the idea is that this is the season when people start to make money.
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Big Friday didn’t quite work
It was kind of a marketing thing. They started out wanting to call it Big Friday, but Big Friday didn’t stick and Black Friday is what we are left with and because of its success, we are now also adding Cyber Monday. Do you know why they call it Cyber Monday? Back in the day, people had slow internet connections at home. At home they would have something called a modem that would make, and then when someone would pick up the phone, you’d get kicked off of the internet. So surfing on the internet was stupid for many people at home. And what they remembered is that my employer pays a lot of money for a really good internet connection at work. So when I get to work on Monday, that’s when I’m going to start shopping.
If you would like to also hear some tips around selling on Black Friday, like which works better? Percentage off or a dollar amount off? Curious, check out the full podcast here.
