Black Friday used to be a term only used inside the Retail Industry

[liberal N proud]

It used to be After Thanksgiving Sales to the public with an emphasis on "After."

The reason it was called Black Friday by the industry was because it marked the point of the year their sales went into the black.

Now with the new shopping hours the term black means that, is what many families who have members working in retail, holidays will be. Holiday's go from being a joyous time to a time of hell.

[NYC_SKP]

1. Carpenters Union had Black Fridays, to keep everyone employed.

During a slowdown, everyone works nine days out of ten in order to keep the tenth person working.

Every other Friday was a Black Friday.

http://www.oocities.org/gangbox/caliwildcat.html

You are right, of course, that it's a time of hell but it's odd how some people seem to get into the frenzy of it.

Not me.

:hi:

[KittyWampus]

2. IMO, it's now denotes those who've died due to getting caught in the herd stampedes

As stores encourage bad behavior amongst people desperate for a bargain whilst not providing adequate crowd control.

[JackRiddler]

3. How dare you mock our nation's most important holiday...

with its essential function of accumulating more life-giving debt and destroying surplus lest we drown in it?

If the Glorious American Consumer On Whom The World Rests doesn't buy a lot of junk on Friday, EVERYTHING COLLAPSES!!!

Why do you hate freedom? Why do you WANT poor workers everywhere to STARVE? You MONSTER!!!

Next you'll be implying that people shouldn't watch the Superbowl, or worse, telling us that the game matters more than the Festival of Big-Budget Commercials it keeps interrupting.

[Odin2005]

4. We should be ashamed of this consumerist insanity.

[SoCalDem]

5. The thing about "black Friday" is this

before mega-jumbo-bigbox stores came along, most merchants "made money" all year long, by providing the merchandise their customers needed/wanted. They only marked things down when size-runs were winnowed (only a size 3 and a size 18 left) or when seasons changed..or when the "new models" came out once or twice a year.

People expected to pay full price for things that were "fresh" on the market, and looked forward to an occasional sale.

Those full-price (yet still affordable to most) transactions meant that the merchant did NOT have to BORROW money to make payroll & pay the overhead all year, in anticipation of making it all back between Thanksgiving & Xmas. That holiday time was the time to PAD the profit, by EXTRA purchasing..and markdowns were AFTER Xmas..

The discount/mall/walmart style of marketing meant that only the largest of corporations could afford to offer super cheap stuff at super cheap prices all year-long and then make it all up with volume-of-sales- on even more discounted stuff sold in a month, at the end of the year..

That was part of the model that starved so many small businesses out of existence:(

[The Magistrate]

6. To Those Of a Certain Age, Sir, 'Black Friday' Remains the Start Of the Great Depression....

And the signifier of financial apocalypse generally....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVQKiqCZ9No