Weird News How Did Black Friday Get Its Name?

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When people emerge from residential hibernation the day after Thanksgiving, they pour into shopping centers. Consumers spent an estimated $59.6 billion over the holiday weekend in 2018, bolstering the bottom line for retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and online outlets.

If Black Friday is such a financial benefit, why is it called Black Friday? That modifier was usually reserved for cash-draining events like the Black Thursday that precipitated the 1929 stock market crash or the 1869 gold market collapse that led to financial ruin.

It turns out that the label didn’t always have the positive holiday spending connotation it enjoys today. Beginning in the 1950s, according to Snopes, employers and media began observing the trend of people calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving—traditionally not a paid holiday—to give themselves a four-day weekend. For businesses, that Friday was indeed bleak, as productivity slowed to a crawl. (Eventually, offices capitulated and gave employees the day off.)

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The man suspected of owning a black panther, which was rescued from rooftops near the northern French city of Lille two weeks ago and later stolen from a zoo, was questioned by police on Tuesday, legal sources said. The young animal, thought to be around six months old and weighing 25-30 kilogrammes (55-66 pounds), had roamed free on September 19 after escaping through the window of a private apartment.The ink-black feline was tranquilised with a dart and taken away in a cage.

Wondering how Black Friday got its name ? You're probably not the only one. Each year the famous sales weekend, which follows Thanksgiving Day and begins on From post-football game chaos in Philadelphia to the people who coined the retail event's name , here is the story behind Black Friday .

Black Friday , which has since been co-opted by major retailers, had an entirely different meaning in 1951. It was originally used by business owners to The site investigated another popular explanation -- that Black Friday is aptly named for the sales that take retailers out of "the red" and "into the black ."

Law enforcement also had reason to be disgruntled with that Friday. With everyone skipping work and kids off of school, traffic in major cities became a problem. Police in Philadelphia who were forced to deal with logjams and work mandatory shifts to cope with the congestion started to dread the day. Again, the “Black Friday” label seemed appropriate.

Eventually, this negative term spread to media and via word-of-mouth. Retailers in Philadelphia even tried to rephrase it to “Big Friday” to avoid the association with disaster. But it was Black Friday that stuck. It soon became synonymous with record profits, and the term was permanently adopted for the frenzied rush of shoppers using their day off to get their shopping done.