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Shop 'til You Drop

With the holidays quickly approaching, many look forward to to fulfilling the wish lists of their loved ones. A critical time for retailers, the National Retail Federation (NRF) says holiday season shopping represents 20 to 30 percent of annual sales.

When we hear the term “Black Friday,” most of us think about the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday, when big box retailers such as Walmart offer extensive bargains. The origins of the term actually go back to 1869.

The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” in relation to the crash of America’s gold market on September 24, 1869. Wall Street financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk created a financial crisis when they conspired to corner the gold market and caused the stock market to collapse.

A more recent story from the late 1950s relates to Philadelphia’s police, who used the term “Black Friday” to describe the grueling hours they put in and the chaos that occurred annually on the day after Thanksgiving when hordes of people descended upon The City of Brotherly Love for the Army-Navy football game. By 1961, the Philadelphia community used the term “Black Friday” to describe the congested streets. In an effort to remove the negative connotation, merchants attempted to change the term to “Big Friday.”

Later in the 1980s, retailers nationwide successfully refashioned the term, spinning it into the story that many believe today: Thanksgiving marks the time of year when American retailers turn a profit—moving from being “in the red” to being “in the black.”

To take advantage of the newly traditional start to the holiday shopping season, many retailers opened at 6:00 a.m.; but, in recent years they began opening even earlier at 5:00 a.m. In 2011, several opened for business at midnight with jaw-dropping bargains to lure shoppers.

In 2010, American launched Small Business Saturday on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It encourages shoppers to patronize locally owned, brick-and-mortar stores as a way to support local business and keep money in local communities.

American Express, in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Boston’s mayor at the time Thomas M. Menino, and the Roslindale neighborhood’s Main Street, sponsored the first Small Business Saturday event. Many local politicians and small business groups joined in. Its success sparked Small Business Saturday in the United Kingdom, which kicked off in 2013.

The NRF coined the term “Cyber Monday” for the Monday after Thanksgiving. The media, along with many retailers and shoppers, regard this day as the official kick-off to home or online shopping for the holiday season. Throughout the holidays, CyberMonday.com highlights thousands of offers from more than 900 retailers season.

NRF projects online holiday sales to increase between 7 and 10 percent to as much as $117 billion during November and December.

By Regina Molaro