Medium-Gray Friday

[canyonwalker]

Thanksgiving Travelog #11
Camp Hill, PA - Fri, 24 Nov 2023. 6pm.

Today's Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when, traditionally, Christmas shopping kicks into high gear. People larded up with excess turkey and cranberry from the day before and stir crazy from having spent too much time cooped up indoors with nutty aunts and uncles seek an outlet. "Why not shopping?" they ask. Decades ago police gave Black Friday its moniker because of the extra patrolling they had to do on streets and in stores as millions of people with nothing else better to do on this widely granted day off from work and school swarmed both.

Today we were part of that Black Friday swarm... or would have been, if there were really a swarm at all! Hawk and I joined her mom in visiting a few stores today. I wanted to make a return at one, Hawk wanted to shop at two others, and her mom wanted to grab a few things opportunistically. While the roads and stores in the area were busy they were certainly not crazy. The checkout lines in a few of them were no worse than 5 minutes long, for example, and when I went to return that one item there was literally no line. I walked straight up to a cashier who cheerfully helped me. This ‘‘black’’ Friday was no darker than medium gray.

Comments

[some_other_dave]

Interesting. I had heard that the monicker "black friday" came from newspapers that repeated the apocryphal story that the day after Thanksgiving was busy enough for retail stores to bring their books out of the red.

[canyonwalker]

I've heard that explanation plenty of times, too. Recently I read that data from retail organizations do not support that explanation and never have. Plus, retailers don't even track profit and loss in that fashion. They don't track revenues YTD and compare them against full-year costs including costs not yet incurred. That doesn't even make sense. Meanwhile, there is evidence that the police department in Philadelphia (the city cited in an article I read) called it Black Friday because of the extra staffing needed to deal with increased traffic, crowds, and petty crime. The story about retailers swinging to profit was ginned up as a more palatable public explanation.