Check out this list of small businesses you can support in San Antonio this holiday season!
With Thanksgiving only a few days away, not only are stores stocking their shelves for last minute turkey dinner needs, they’re also stocking up for the biggest shopping day of the year: Black Friday.
Everyone’s familiar with the massive lines, the crazy price cuts, and the wild stories of mobs before opening, but what’s the origin of the phrase? “Black Friday” has been in use since the late 19th century, but was not used in connection to the shopping day until the early 1960s. Black Friday was first used in a negative sense to describe the day in between Thanksgiving and the Army-Navy football game traditionally played in Philadelphia. Terrible traffic jams, too many pedestrians, and general frustration characterized the shopping day for police and bus drivers alike.
This definition continued into the early 1980s until retailers began using it to describe their sales cycle. Many retailers operate at a deficit for most of the year and make their biggest profits during the holiday season. For most of the year, companies use red ink to show negative amounts of money, and black ink for positive amounts. Black Friday is the start to the holiday shopping season, and therefore marks the time when retailers begin to collect their sales profits and can start to use black ink.
This holiday season, don’t just look for the best shopping deals, look at how companies are trying to reach you as a customer and take note of their approach. Is it online? In print? Does the pull of one "day" over another make you want to join the festivities? All of this could be important to consider when you start your own business someday!
With research and writing by Grace Frye.
