Black Friday, what is it and where has it come from?

 

Black Friday, what is it and where has it come from?

I don’t know about you but over the past few years do you feel like Black Friday has just appeared from nowhere, with absolutely no explanation of what it is and how it’s evolved?

 Was your answer yes? Well, I have done a little research for you to give you a quick insight into it all.

 It all started in America at the time of Thanksgiving. This holiday traditionally falls on the fourth Thursday of November to give thanks for what they have. Families and friends get together for a meal, which traditionally includes a roast turkey and pumpkin pie. In some cities and towns, there are parades during the Thanksgiving weekend and in most areas, these festivities also mark the opening of the Christmas shopping season, but as the celebrations got bigger the Americans started to phone in sick on the Friday to give themselves a long weekend. As you would expect the footfall in the retail environments increased dramatically causing carnage in the cities across the country which is how it got the name Black Friday. The police gave it this informal name as the vast number of shoppers were causing heavy traffic, accidents and even violence.

Black Friday has actually been around since the 1940’s but it was only in the 1980’s that retailers began to truly embrace the day. For most people it’s ideally placed as it falls on the last pay weekend before Christmas and attracts shoppers into stores. Then in 2005, before it was natural to order anything and everything on the internet, online stores began running their own big sales to compete with the brick-and-mortar juggernaut that was Black Friday. This was the beginning of Cyber Monday. It would usually have been exclusively reserved for online discounts, but this is not the case anymore as it’s now branded as Black Friday weekend. Officially you would see deals starting from Thursday night but now you may see retailers offering them from the start of the week.

So how did it start in England?

In 2010 Amazon was the first retailer to start offering the UK Black Friday deals, but not many people knew about this and to have discounts before Christmas was totally unheard of in England. Then in 2013 Asda, an American owned company decided to offer huge discounts for Black Friday. This caused utter mayhem in stores as customers scrambled and pushed to snatch cut-price electrical goods after queueing for several hours outside the stores around the country.

It was a massive success despite scuffles between customers battling for products as the retailer said it sold a month’s worth of televisions in forty-five minutes on November 29 and electronic sales were up four hundred percent compared to the same week in the previous year. This then spread on to other retailers across the country as they too wanted a slice of the sale action. The Black Friday phenomenon is not making shoppers spend more - it's just making shoppers spend earlier in the lead up to Christmas. In 2018 sales growth in the UK was highest in November and Black Friday was a huge success!  But don’t worry, there will be no shortage of deals this year at Barsleys with offers running from Sunday the 24^th to Saturday the 30^th November.  With this year set to be one of the biggest yet, it’s a key date in any bargain hunters diary!

Posted by Display
26th November 2019

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