So, here’s a question: What are you doing on 28th November? Or, if you’re reading this article after that date: What did you do on 28 November?
What’s so significant about the 28th November 2014? It’s Black Friday. If you haven’t heard of Black Friday, I should reassure you that calling it Black Friday does not signify that something terrible is going to happen/happened on that date. It’s a US thing which refers to a day when the retailers put loads of stuff on sale. And that day tends to be the Friday after Thanksgiving, a celebration of the blessings of the agricultural year, which is always on the fourth Thursday in November.
According to Wikipedia, the term Black Friday originated in Philadelphia in 1961 “to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving” and only started to be used in other parts of the US around 1975. An alternative explanation is that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the point in the year at which retailers start to make a profit by going into the black.
To all intents and purposes, despite the best efforts of PR people and retailers, there still isn’t really a Black Friday outside of the US. Yes, a number of retailers offer deals and quite a few US companies cut prices on some items on their websites but it’s still a relatively low-key affair. It’s fair to say that very few people in Ireland are gripped with sales fever in the run up to the fourth Friday in November.
As an aside, it should be noted that whereas Black Friday is an essentially benign event, any Black Monday tends to have far more negative connotations. Wikipedia lists seven Black Mondays and not one of them (including the infamous stock market crash of 19 October 1987) was a good day.
For our US cousins, the weekend after Black Friday offers only a brief respite before Cyber Monday arrives. As its name suggests, this is a much newer tradition, created by marketing companies to encourage people to shop online. According to wikipedia, the term made its debut in a shop.org press release in 2005 entitled Cyber Monday quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year, dated, you guessed it, 28 November.
Diplomatic immunity
At the moment, people and businesses in Ireland have proven to be largely immune to the lure of adding two more shopping days to the year. Efforts to try and establish Black Friday and Cyber Monday more widely are probably hindered by the fact Thanksgiving is not a holiday in many places outside the US and that even the few countries that do celebrate a version of Thanksgiving, such as Canada, do so on a different date.
In any case, here in Ireland many people have their own extra shopping day on 8 December when everyone goes shopping in the big towns and cities and, depending on the exchange rate and the state of the economy, others join queues of cars wending their way into the north to return some time later laden with all manner of trinkets and baubles. After attending mass for the holy day of obligation of the feast of the immaculate conception, obviously.
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