Re: Black Friday?
This may have been a misconception at least according to the Wiki article on this topic. Here is what it says
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%28shopping%29
The earliest uses of “Black Friday” refer to the heavy traffic on that day, an implicit comparison to the extremely stressful and chaotic experience of Black Tuesday (the 1929 stock-market crash) or other black days. The earliest known references to “Black Friday” (in this sense) are from two newspaper articles from November 29, 1975, that explicitly refer to the day’s hectic nature and heavy traffic. The first reference is in an article entitled “Army vs. Navy: A Dimming Splendor,” in The New York Times:[INDENT]Philadelphia police and bus drivers call it “Black Friday” - that day each year between Thanksgiving Day and the Army-Navy game. It is the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year in the Bicentennial City as the Christmas list is checked off and the Eastern college football season nears conclusion.
The derivation is made even more explicit in an Associated Press article entitled “Folks on Buying Spree Despite Down Economy,” which ran in the Titusville Herald on the same day:Store aisles were jammed. Escalators were nonstop people. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season and despite the economy, folks here went on a buying spree. . . . . “That’s why the bus drivers and cab drivers call today ‘Black Friday,’” a sales manager at Gimbels said as she watched a traffic cop trying to control a crowd of jaywalkers. “They think in terms of headaches it gives them.”
Both articles have a Philadelphia dateline, suggesting the term may have originated in that area.
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**More recently, a false assumption has been circulated that the term originates from the theory that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during the holiday season. **