In 2011, 226 million Americans purchased $52 billion worth of merchandise on that Thanksgiving weekend alone. About 135 million people shop on Black Friday every year
People are desperate for those deals. So desperate, that some are willing to camp out for nearly two weeks in order to assure they get their bargain. This happened in Florida where Christina Orta camped out for 12 days in order to snag a TV for cheap.
Black Friday does not have the best deals. The last few days of the holiday shopping season will usually have better deals than Black Friday. Some products may even sell for 10 percent to 15 percent less.
People generally enjoy shopping on Black Friday. According to a 2012 study of roughly 460 consumers for WWD by Marvin Traub Associates, it was found that 57% of Black Friday shoppers enjoyed the experience. However, 43% did not.
There are two popular theories as to the origins of Black Friday. According to a 2009 article published in TIME magazine, the phrase “Black Friday” was first used in the 1960′s by newspapers in Philadelphia to illustrate the resemblance of the great numbers of consumers and the madness seen after the stock market panic of September 24, 1864 (also known as Black Friday). The second theory, according to NRF comes from the retail accounting perspective; which refer to the stores’ profit margins in the days when the books were kept by hand. Red ink represented a loss in profit while black ink represented a profit. Signifying the day’s potential to bring profit to businesses.
Researchers have found that Black Friday is also about the sport of shopping, the thrill and satisfaction of “winning” that TV before your competition does.
According to Time.com, many products promoted at deep discounts on Black Friday are “derivative products”. In other words items that look like and are named the same as the standard models, but are actually made with cheaper components and may not have the same features. Consumer Reports found that big-name companies like Sony and Samsung have made derivative televisions in previous years.
Some stores tighten their return policies considerably during the holidays thus making it harder to return items. And even if you can return items some retailers will only give you store credit in spite of you having a receipt.
Gray Thursday is on the rise. According to the National Retail Federation, retailers have gone from opening in the early morning of Black Friday to opening on the evening of Thanksgiving itself. And 26% of people surveyed stated that they planned on shopping online on Thanksgiving Day.
Last year, shoppers at a California Walmart were exposed to pepper spray by a 33-year-old shopper named Elizabeth Macias. Nearly two dozen people, including children, suffered nose and throat irritation.
There is an alternative to the craze of consumerism. Try not buying anything. In fact, for the past 20 years or so there has been a growing movement protesting the hyper commercialism associated with Black Friday by refusing to buy anything on that day.
In 2008, Jdimytai Damour, a Long Island Walmart employee, was trampled to death when crazed shoppers pushed open the doors to get their hands on the Black Friday discounted items. The paramedics who came to the rescue were also trampled and seriously injured by shoppers. In total, five shoppers at the store required hospitalization. Sadly, this is but one of many of such cases.
The unofficial start of the holiday shopping season is often referred to as the busiest shopping day of the year. But where did this tradition start and just how big is it? Here are the answers to a few frequently asked questions about Black Friday. Hopefully they’ll give you some good talking points next year as you line up outside Best Buy at 4 a.m.
HOW DID BLACK FRIDAY BECOME SUCH A BIG SHOPPING DAY?
It’s hard to say when the day after Thanksgiving turned into a retail behemoth, but it probably dates back to the late 19th century. At that time, store-sponsored Thanksgiving parades were common, and once Santa Claus showed up at the end of the parade, the holiday shopping season had officially started.
In those days, most retailers adhered to an unwritten rule that holiday shopping season didn’t start until after Thanksgiving, so no stores would advertise holiday sales or aggressively court customers until the Friday immediately following the holiday. Thus, when the floodgates opened that Friday, it became a huge deal.
SO RETAILERS WERE ALWAYS HOPING FOR AN EARLY THANKSGIVING?
You bet. They weren’t just hoping, though; they were being proactive about it. In 1939, the Retail Dry Goods Association warned Franklin Roosevelt that if the holiday season wouldn’t begin until after Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on the traditional final Thursday in November, retail sales would go in the tank. Ever the iconoclast, Roosevelt saw an easy solution to this problem: he moved Thanksgiving up by a week. Instead of celebrating the holiday on its traditional day—November 30th that year—Roosevelt declared the next-to-last Thursday in November to be the new Thanksgiving, instantly tacking an extra week onto the shopping season.
BRILLIANT! HOW DID THAT WORK OUT?
Not so well. Roosevelt didn’t make the announcement until late October, and by then most Americans had already made their holiday travel plans. Many rebelled and continued to celebrate Thanksgiving on its “real” date while derisively referring to the impostor holiday as “Franksgiving.” State governments didn’t know which Thanksgiving to observe, so some of them took both days off. In short, it was a bit of a mess.
By 1941, though, the furor had died down, and Congress passed a law that made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November regardless of how it affected the shopping day that would become known as Black Friday.
WHY CALL IT BLACK FRIDAY?
If you ask most people why the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday, they’ll explain that the name stems from retailers using the day’s huge receipts as their opportunity to “get in the black” and become profitable for the year. The first recorded uses of the term “Black Friday” are a bit less rosy, though.
According to researchers, the name “Black Friday” dates back to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. The Friday in question is nestled snugly between Thanksgiving and the traditional Army-Navy football game that’s played in Philadelphia on the following Saturday, so the City of Brotherly Love was always bustling with activity on that day. All of the people were great for retailers, but they were a huge pain for police officers, cab drivers, and anyone who had to negotiate the city’s streets. They started referring to the annual day of commercial bedlam as “Black Friday” to reflect how irritating it was.
SO WHERE DID THE WHOLE “GET IN THE BLACK” STORY ORIGINATE?
Apparently storeowners didn’t love having their biggest shopping day saddled with such a negative moniker, so in the early 1980s someone began floating the accounting angle to put a more positive spin on the big day.
DO RETAILERS REALLY NEED BLACK FRIDAY TO TURN AN ANNUAL PROFIT?
Major retailers don’t; they’re generally profitable—or at least striving for profitability—throughout the entire year. (A company that turned losses for three quarters out of every fiscal year wouldn’t be a big hit with investors.) Some smaller outlets may parlay big holiday season sales into annual profits, though.
IS BLACK FRIDAY REALLY THE BIGGEST SHOPPING DAY OF THE YEAR?
It’s certainly the day of the year in which you’re most likely to be punched while grabbing for the latest Elmo doll, but it might not be the busiest day in terms of gross receipts. According to Snopes.com, Black Friday is generally one of the top six or seven days of the year for stores, but it’s the days immediately before Christmas when procrastinators finally get shopping that stores make the serious loot. Black Friday may, however, be the busiest day of the year in terms of customer traffic.
Snopes’ data shows the ten-year span from 1993 to 2002, and in that interval Black Friday was never higher than fourth on the list of the year’s busiest shopping days by sales volume. In 2003 and 2005 Black Friday did climb to the top of the pile for sales revenue days, but it still gets stiff competition from the week leading up to Christmas, particularly the Saturday right before the big day.
DO PEOPLE REALLY GET INJURED ON BLACK FRIDAY?
Sadly, yes. The most tragic Black Friday incident happened in 2008, when 34-year-old seasonal employee Jdimytai Damour died from asphyxiation after 2,000 shoppers knocked him own and stampeded over his back after the doors opened at 5 a.m. at the Wal-Mart on Long Island, New York.
In 2010, nine people in a California shopping mall were injured, including an elderly woman who had to be taken to the hospital, after a rugby-style scrum erupted when gift certificates were dropped from the ceiling.
In Buffalo, New York, several more shoppers were trampled trying to get into a Target. One of the victims, Keith Krantz, who was pinned against a metal door support and then shoved to the ground, told a CNN affiliate he thought he would be killed. “At that moment, I was thinking I don’t want to die here on the ground,” Krantz said.
In Murray, Utah, 15,000 shoppers swamped a mall with such force, the local police had to respond to break up skirmishes and fist fights, and keep shoppers from ransacking stores. Down in Boynton Beach, Florida, a man in a crowd of eager shoppers waiting for a Wal-Mart to open was found carrying a handgun, two knives and a pepper spray grenade.
In 2008, a fight broke out between a young girl and a man at another Wal-Mart store in Columbus, Ohio, over a 40-inch Samsung flat-screen television. It was $798, marked down from $1,000. The New York Times reported that the not-so-aptly-named Nikki Nicely, 19, leaped onto a fellow shopper’s back and began pounding his shoulders violently when he attempted to purchase the television. “That’s my TV!” shouted Ms. Nicely, who then took an elbow to the face. “That’s my TV!” The fight was broken up by a police officer and security guard. “That’s right,” Nicely cried as her adversary walked away. “This here is my TV!”
That same year, inside a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California, two women erupted into a dispute and began punching each other in the face until their friends—unluckily, both men with handguns—entered the fray.
The men chased each other through the toy store, careened around Christmas decorations and half-price electronics, and eventually shot each other to death by the cash register.
(Toys R Us later released a statement saying that although the shoppers’ deaths arose as a result of a dispute, which broke out in an aisle of Toys R Us on Black Friday, it would be “inaccurate to associate the events of today with Black Friday.”)
Two years after that incident, a 21-year-old woman who’d been waiting outside another Toys R Us store in Madison, Wisconsin, freaked out, cut in line, and pulled a gun on her fellow shoppers.
HOW CAN THIS KIND OF THING BE AVOIDED?
In an effort to keep a few would-be clients from personal injury law firms, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released a special checklist for retailers expecting large crowds.
So what’s OSHA’s advice? Consider using bullhorns. Hire a team of police officers. Be prepared for “crowd crushing” and “violent acts.” Set up barricades. And, above all else, when the charging shoppers come a’runnin’, stay out of the way.
Haley Sweetland Edwards contributed to this story, portions of which originally appeared in 2009.
Kmart will open its doors at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day this year and remain open for 42 hours, meaning that many employees will have to come to work to staff shifts. While the company says it tries to fill the slots with volunteers or seasonal hires, workers are reporting that the reality on the ground is very different.
Jillian Fisher, who started a petition on Coworker.org asking Kmart to give her mother and other employees the flexibility to take the holiday off, surveyed 56 self-identified employees from more than 13 states. Of those, just three said they had the option to ask to take the holiday off. In a press release from the petition organizer, one employee said human resources has told them, “if you do not come to work on Thanksgiving, you will automatically be fired… I made the request to work a split shift on Thanksgiving and was denied.” Another said, “Our manager stated at a staff meeting: ‘Everyone must work Thanksgiving and Black Friday. No time off.’” At one location, an employee says signs have been posted in the break room saying workers can’t request time off on Thanksgiving or Black Friday and that everyone has to put in at least some time on both, while at another signs have been posted saying no one can request time off between November 15 and January 1.
“I am a lead at a Kmart and it is mandatory for me to work on Thanksgiving,” another employee said. “If I were to call out I would be terminated, and requesting off is not allowed.”
Only seven surveyed employees said their stores had given employees the chance to volunteer for a holiday shift. “[A]t my store, they scheduled workers who aren’t seasonal and who DIDN’T volunteer to work on Thanksgiving,” one said. Another said, “I didn’t volunteer to work on either of these days they just pretty much scheduled me regardless if I had plans or not on Thanksgiving.”
And most workers have no idea whether they’re going to be asked to give up some of their Thanksgiving dinner to come to work, even with the holiday a week away. Forty-three percent of the surveyed employees said they still don’t know their schedules for Thanksgiving or Black Friday. Fisher says that her mother has sometimes found out her schedule as little as a day ahead of time.
They may be in for a rude surprise: of those who know their schedules, all but two have to work on Thanksgiving, while about three-quarters also have to come in the next day.
In response to questions about the survey results, a company spokesperson said in a statement, “Again, we reiterate that our stores do their very best to staff with seasonal associates and those who volunteer to work holidays. Seasonal associates are told upon hire of our holiday store hours and we make every effort to accommodate associate shift requests during this time. Associate schedules are posted, on average, two weeks in advance – including for holiday schedules. All associates are compensated time and a half pay for the hours they work on Thanksgiving Day. We continue to express deep appreciation in advance to all associates who will be working Thanksgiving and Black Friday.”
Kmart employees aren’t alone in being asked to come to work on the holiday. Twelve retail chains will be open, requiring millions of people to leave home. Erratic and last-minute schedules are rampant in the industry, so others may also be in limbo waiting to find out whether they will miss out on time with friends and family. And no American is guaranteed a paid holiday off, so many others may find they aren’t able to request the time off.
Some stores, on the other hand, are deciding to just stay closed and let employees be at home to celebrate: 17 have announced they will not open on Thanksgiving. Many say it’s to allow their workers to take a break and be with loved ones.
Fisher will keep the momentum going in the pushback against Kmart. “I plan to continue to fight not just for my mother, but for every family that has had to choose between spending time together and working longer hours,” she said. “We are simply asking Kmart to display more effort when it comes to allowing employees to request off or volunteer to work on Thanksgiving.”
UPDATE
This story has been updated with a new statement from Kmart.
UPDATE
Kmart workers shared the following photos of signs posted in their workplaces saying that employees can’t take days off during the holidays:
![DSC_0258[6]](http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/DSC_02586-638x359.jpg)
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