BLACK FRIDAY: THE PANIC OF 1869 IN THE GOLD MARKET

Black Friday

The Grandma loves sales and discounts and yesterday was a great day for her and her businesses. She wanted to write her daily report but she was so occupied shopping on line that she forgot to write it.

Before Black Friday started, The Grandma had already studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 21).

Because of The Grandma was totally crazy buying as many offers as she found, she hadn't got enough time to take some photos of this special day.

More information: Will (Promises, Decisions, Refusing)

Black Friday is an informal name for the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, which is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.

Black Friday has been regarded as the beginning of America's Christmas shopping season since 1952, although the term Black Friday didn't become widely used until more recent decades.

Many stores offer highly promoted sales on Black Friday and open very early, such as at midnight, or may even start their sales at some time on Thanksgiving.

Black Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some other states observe The Day After Thanksgiving as a holiday for state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday, such as Columbus Day. Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend, makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers.

Black Friday

Black Friday has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States since 2005, although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time.

Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback. In 2014, spending volume on Black Friday fell for the first time since the 2008 recession. $50.9 billion was spent during the 4-day Black Friday weekend, down 11% from the previous year. However, the U.S. economy was not in a recession. Christmas creep has been cited as a factor in the diminishing importance of Black Friday, as many retailers now spread out their promotions over the entire months of November and December rather than concentrate them on a single shopping day or weekend.

The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being in the red to being in the black.

More information: The Balance

There have been reports of violence occurring between shoppers on Black Friday. Since 2006, there have been 10 reported deaths and 111 injuries throughout the United States. It is common for prospective shoppers to camp out over the Thanksgiving holiday in an effort to secure a place in front of the line and thus a better chance at getting desired items. This poses a significant safety risk, such as the use of propane and generators in the most elaborate cases, and in general, the blocking of emergency access and fire lanes, causing at least one city to ban the practice.

Since the start of the 21st century, there have been attempts by retailers with origins in the United States to introduce a retail Black Friday to other countries around the world. In several countries, local retailers have attempted to promote the day to remain competitive with US-based online retailers.

Black Friday

For centuries, the adjective black has been applied to days upon which calamities occurred. Many events have been described as Black Friday, although the most significant such event in American History was the Panic of 1869, which occurred when financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk took advantage of their connections with the Grant Administration in an attempt to corner the gold market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold, which halted the run and caused prices to drop by eighteen percent. Fortunes were made and lost in a single day, and the president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined.

The earliest known use of Black Friday to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurs in the journal, Factory Management and Maintenance, for November 1951, and again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, in order to have a four-day weekend. 

However, this use does not appear to have caught on. Around the same time, the terms Black Friday and Black Saturday came to be used by the police in Philadelphia and Rochester to describe the crowds and traffic congestion accompanying the start of the Christmas shopping season. In 1961, the city and merchants of Philadelphia attempted to improve conditions, and a public relations expert recommended rebranding the days, Big Friday and Big Saturday; but these terms were quickly forgotten.

More information: Money Crashers

Use of the phrase spread slowly, first appearing in The New York Times on November 29, 1975, in which it still refers specifically to the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year in Philadelphia. Although it soon became more widespread, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1985 that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were still unaware of the term.

As the phrase gained national attention in the early 1980s, merchants objecting to the use of a derisive term to refer to one of the most important shopping days of the year suggested an alternative derivation: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year, January through November, and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving. When this was recorded in the financial records, once-common accounting practices would use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be in the red, instead taking in the year's profits. The earliest known published reference to this explanation occurs in The Philadelphia Inquirer for November 28, 1981.

More information: History

 You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. 

The idea is pretty straightforward. 

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

Bill Gates