Charlie Riedel/The Associated Press
The old saying goes: “I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays,” which implies that you haven’t seen someone in an extremely long period of time.
We have been thrust into a recurring and new version of a seemingly endless string of days with the imposed monthlong Black Friday sales strategy. Leave it to corporate America to again overindulge in their commercial endeavors to oversaturate the public with a month of Sundays — or, in this case, a month of Fridays, painted black.
On average, shoppers will spend roughly $762 on their friends and family, a separate report by NerdWallet found. But this year, a Gallup poll released Tuesday expects Americans to spend $886 on average this holiday season.
Unfortunately, one third of these gift givers are still paying off last year’s accrued debt.
Black Friday has painted their credit accounts red.
The term “Black Friday” was first coined back in the late 1860s to describe the financial crisis in response to the crash of the U.S. gold market.
The earliest known example of “Black Friday” to refer to the day after Thanksgiving derives from an article in the November 1951 issue of Factory Management and Maintenance in which it talks about factory management noticing that much of their workforce would phone in sick the Friday morning after Thanksgiving to give themselves a four-day weekend.
Our commercial version of “Black Friday” started in Philadelphia in the early 1950s to describe the hoards of shoppers and tourists the flooded the streets ahead of the Army-Navy football game held annually on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Just a few years ago, Black Friday sales didn’t start until the morning after Thanksgiving and then it was bumped up to the midnight after Thanksgiving and then to the early evening of Thanksgiving Day. Last year, the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the fan, exploding Black Friday into a monthlong affair in 2020, happening mainly online to keep shoppers out of the stores.
This year I started getting Black Friday sale notices on the first of November and I realized that the drudgery was being foisted upon us. The month of Fridays — black or red, depending on how much you buy and charge — is with us to stay.
I have taken advantage of the day after Thanksgiving sales in the past, when it was a one day affair. My question now is, “Are the new early November Black Friday deals the real deal? Or can these sales be lumped into the category of sales specials that we now see year round such as those on Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc?”
Black Friday sales in the past were often highlighted by “doorbusters,” sale items of which were few in number, but were sold a rock bottom to draw people into the store at prices so low that the retailer was essentially giving the stuff away. Unfortunately for the retail stores offering the doorbuster deals, the public began to take the term “doorbuster” literally, to knock down the doors as they burst in while trampling over barricades, piles of merchandise, and fellow shoppers and battling each other tooth and nail for the few low priced items being offered. You no longer had to go to Pamplona, Spain, to take part in the “Running of the Bulls.” Merely show up at your local electronics box store the morning after Thanksgiving and voila, you might just be teleported into you own bull running stampede.
“‘Tis the season, to be jolly,” I suppose.
It’s now“Black Friday morning as I pen this column and according to news reports there are lines of people outside the box stores, but the lines are not huge and the shoppers have been orderly. Experts have noted that the price of “on sale” items this year are an average of 32 percent off, but that goods are, on average, 17 percent more costly than last year due to labor and supply chain shortages. I checked the Amazon price for a laptop that had comparable features to the one that I was thinking of buying last Memorial Day, on sale, and the price was about the same.
It seems that the civil in civilization is back this year along with the normalcy of being able to actually shop indoors at the store of your choice. Also, retailers have rethought the idea of “doorbuster deals” in lieu of the fact that shoppers in the past took the term literally. I suspect that holiday shoppers were merely glad and eager to be able to shop in store for the hands on experience that was missed in 2020.
David Kittredge is a regular Lifestyles contributor to the Eagle Times. You can send comments to him via the editor at [email protected].
As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.