A black day originally referred to something disastrous. It was used in English by the famous translator John Trevisa as early as the late 14th century.
For the last 150 years, the main use of the term, however, has occurred in connection with stock markets. And because financial markets have their fair share of ups and downs, there have been a lot of black days. The first Black Friday resulted from gold markets buckling in 1869. Then, there was the big stock market crash in New York in 1929 on Black Monday and Black Tuesday in 1929, and a global black Monday in 1987 when the Dow Jones crashed 22.6% on one day.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first written reference to Black Friday as a shopping day goes back to an issue of a business journal published in1951. The Factory Management and Maintenance journal jokingly refers to the day as a day on which nobody works and proposed that it should be added to the list of paid holidays. A 1961 issue of the New York Public Relations News reported that although the day was good for retailers, the shopping spree caused so many traffic problems in Philadelphia that police officers termed the days following Thanksgiving “Black Friday” and “Black Saturday.”
Today, Black Friday inaugurates the biggest shopping period of the year in the United States. Last year, some stores even opened on Thursday evening and allowed shoppers to shop through the night. Shoppers were delighted. In total they spent almost USD 60 billion in three days and underlined the fact that for the retailers’ bottom line, the day certainly generates profits, or black ink.
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