Just when did they start this black Friday stuff anyway? I don't recall it even back in the 80's

[Douglas Carpenter]

If I went back to the 60's - I remember the Friday after Thanksgiving back in Corry, PA as being the first day of the holiday season - the stores would be all lit up - Santa Claus would make an appearance - the downtown Christmas lights would be switched on and there would be a celebratory, happy holiday mood permeating the town. Now it's like Thanksgiving is over and the devil gains his power.

[llmart]

1. Now it's a sacred "holiday".

It's insane how the media can hype something long enough and it becomes reality. I'm old enough to remember what you're talking about re: the 60's too and the 70's. I seem to recall that it sort of started in the 80's like all the other greed in this country once Reagan and his ilk took office. Everything became about money and stuff then.

[arely staircase]

2. during the 70s they mainly stuck to hijackings

That was Black Friday, right?

[Art_from_Ark]

5. I think you're thinking of "Black September"

and we don't really want to get into that.

[arely staircase]

6. well at least they have it narrowed down to a day instead of a whole month now. nt

[HereSince1628]

3. I think it started before the original movie "Miracle on 34th street"

Wasn't the whole point of Macy's sponsorship of the T'giving Day parade to highlight their store?

I know back in the 50's my hometowns local Sears department store debuted their holiday display windows on the Friday after thanksgiving.

[rurallib]

4. This will explain a lot

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/everything-you-know-about-black-friday-is-wrong.html

Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, thousands of fans thronged Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium for the Army-Navy football game. As festive as the mood was inside the stadium, it wasn’t nearly so cheerful for the Philadelphia police officers who had to herd the crowds. The game was frequently held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and just as visiting fans were showing up the day before, holiday shoppers also would descend on downtown. On those Fridays after Thanksgiving, the late Joseph P. Barrett, a longtime reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin, recalled, even members of the police band were called upon to direct traffic. The cops nicknamed the day of gridlock Black Friday, and soon others started to do the same.

Retailers worried the phrase would scare people away. A few weeks after the 1961 game, which President John F. Kennedy had attended, the P.R. pioneer Denny Griswold described in her industry newsletter, Public Relations News, the efforts by Philadelphia merchants and city officials to rebrand the day Big Friday, in reference to the start of the holiday shopping season. (“The media coöperated,” Griswold wrote.) Big Friday didn’t stick, but the idea behind it did, in Philadelphia and, eventually, beyond. A few decades later, when the term came to describe a day when retailers’ ledgers shifted “into the black” for the year—a connotation also pushed by marketers—people assumed that had always been the connotation.

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