The truth about Black Friday

"When Black Friday comes/I'll stand down by the door/And catch the grey men when they/Dive from the fourteenth floor." --"Black Friday," Steely Dan, from "Katy Lied." The most frequently mentioned Black Friday, because it comes around every year, is the day after Thanksgiving, which is often erroneously referred to as "the official start of Christmas shopping season" and "the busiest retail sales day of the year." As you can see above, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker weren't referring to that Black Friday in their 1975 album, but to the Black Thursday stock market crash of 1929, which they may have been confusing with the Black Friday Wall Street panic of 1869 caused by two guys' attempts to corner the gold market. Another Steely Dan song is slightly more appropriate: "You'll need the tools for survival/And the medicine for the blues/Sweet treats and surprises/For the little buckaroos." --"The Last Mall," from "Everything Must Go," Steely Dan. That song seems to actually be about some apocalyse, but never mind that. Black Friday is indeed an important day in the retail calendar, but that importance used to be exaggerated by the media, and by doing that for decades we in the media seem to be turning Black Friday into what we said it was all along. In the 1960s, Christmas decorations in most cities did not appear until the day after Thanksgiving (and people wrote columns complaining that this rushed the season) when most people have a day off but nothing to do except eat leftovers. By the 1970s we had gotten used to it -- the "rushing the season" columns were confined to the first stores to put the seasonal decorations even earlier -- and television stations gave heavy coverage because it was an interesting, telegenic story on a really slow news day. I don't know if this is true everywhere, but in the Baltimore-Washington area where I grew up the original meaning of Black Friday in the context of the day after Thanksgiving was negative, referring to the traffic jams at shopping centers. But after awhile the term was co-opted by retailers who said it meant the juncture at which they stopping operating "in the red" and began running "in the black," a reference to the fact that most retailers do at least a third of their annual business between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The International Conference of Shopping Centers provides retail sales and traffic data for the seasonal season starting from Black Friday, which is often wrongly treated as an official gospel of total retail sales. Until recent years, even the ICSC was careful to tell anyone willing to listen that Black Friday, while a busy day for foot traffic, was never the biggest sales day -- that was always the last Saturday before Christmas. But in 2003 and 2005, Black Friday came in first, and it was second in 2004. Truth has come into alignment with news reports. If you parse the shopping season by calendar weeks, measuring Sunday-to-Saturday cycles the way Hospitality Advisors does for hotels, then the three weeks from Thanksgiving each account for 14% or 15% of seasonal sales, the next week gets 18% and the last week before Christmas accounts for 23% of sales. Thanksgiving weekend by itself accounts for roughly 10% of seasonal sales. So, yes, it's a big deal.