Why Is Black Friday Is Called Black Friday

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all eat a lot of turkey, and build up a lot of energy for all those Black Friday sales tomorrow.

Most people know Black Friday as the biggest shopping day of the year, and the official start of the holiday season. But how did the name Black Friday came about? And why use black? After all, a black day is usually associated with something negative. For example, the day the stock market crashed was called Black Monday, and Black Sunday referred to the 1918 attack of SM U-151 against U.S. ships off the coast of New Jersey.

We Are In The Black!

In the retail business, Black Friday comes from an accounting term. In accounting, the colors used to represent profit and lost are black and red. Red means the company is losing money. Black means it’s making a profit. Black Friday represents the day that retail businesses stop losing money and start making a profit. Now, I’m not sure (because I have never been in the retail industry before) if it takes a retail business until the day after Thanksgiving to go into the black, but one thing is for sure: if they’re not in the black by Thanksgiving, they will be after Black Friday.

The Thanksgiving weekend can make up as much as 10 percent of all holiday sales, according to retail analyst Dana Telsey of Telsey Advisory Group, while the 10 days before Christmas can account for 40 percent of the total. That’s half of retails’ yearly sales done in 13 days!

Please Don’t Trample Me!

black-friday-shopping-fight

One of the things I hate doing is waiting in line. To me, time is money and time spent waiting in line is time wasted that could be going to generating income or spending with family members. It truly amazes me that people would line up for hours on end to save a few bucks on some DVDs or trample over each other for a box of chocolate. Here’s a typical Black Friday sales at a Best Buy.

And this is how the employees inside the Best Buy see things.

Make Money on Black Friday, Not Spend It

I don’t spend money on Black Friday. Instead, I use the day to make money. Like retail, Black Friday is a gold mine for affiliate marketers. People are in a spending mood. It’s your job to separate them from their money, and I intend to do that! 😛