Black Friday Update

A couple of years ago, Marie, of Disarranging Mine fame, asked when Black Friday became Black Friday.  I did a quick search and found that the popularity of calling the day of shopping after Thanksgiving Black Friday really started increasing around 2002.  I didn't pay much attention to Black Friday last year because I was too busy being a Thanksgiving host.  This past weekend, however, found me lazing about at my father's, watching too much television.  It was non-stop Black Friday coverage by Syracuse tv news so I re-did my search.

In the intervening two years Lexis-Nexis changed their search tool, so the absolute numbers are way different even if the patterns are the same.  What I did this year was search for the phrase "black friday" occurring in headlines and lead paragraphs of U.S. newspapers for each November since 1991 (Note:  In 2005 the search over November and December resulted in fewer hits).  I removed duplicates and articles that included the phrase but were talking about something completely unrelated.

The results are slightly different this year.  There was a slow, unsteady rise from no mentions of "black friday" in 1991 to 85 hits in 2003.  Hits jumped about 80% from 2003 to 2004 and doubled the year after that.  The numbers for this year are current through whatever Lexis-Nexis had indexed through yesterday afternoon and are bound to rise by the end of the month.

By skimming the headlines you do see an interesting pattern.  Through the 1990s almost every article is a business article about the importance of the day to retailers.  The increasing number of Black Friday stories beginning around 2000 is due mostly to more news reports about shoppers descending upon stores and malls.  The big jump in 2004 is mainly from newspapers grasping the zeitgeist and getting proactive.  Lifestyle sections start doling out consumer hints, shopping strategies, and the rare cautionary story about not spending beyond your means, before the big day.

Curiously, the first appearance of a news item about Black Friday being so over was in 1999.

Curmudgeonly articles about the evils of shopping as a means to emotional fulfillment have slowly increased in the past several years as well.  They probably number less than a dozen this year.  Maybe that'll be the trend next year after the economy tanks!