Black Friday is coming up!

Boomerang

Boomerang

Stone Throwing Rebel
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Somewhat Known 10 Year Club
and I can not wait. I love Black Friday shopping. I can't think of anything I really want to get this year though. I will have to come up with something in the next few days!

In the past I have gotten a laptop, cookware, diamond earrings, a GPS, and a HD radio all for a fraction of the cost on any other day of the year.

Are you a Black Friday shopper? What sort of experiences have you had with it?
 
My mom is coming up and she and I have ALWAYS gone BF shopping.

BUT, and this is a big but, she got stuck in traffic the other day, out in TN actually, and it was somewhere that doesn't compare to what I deal with on a daily basis up here. So she asked how we handled it. Traffic light by traffic light, Momma. Anyhow, last year, it took Matt THREE HOURS to get out of the mall parking lot during holiday season- not even ON BF, just during holiday season. So I told her I'd take her BF shopping. :24: I didn't tell her how bad it would be. Our mall is open from midnight to 1130PM, and half an hour before the stores open the lot is jammed. She has NO idea what she's getting into!

I have to admit I feel a little evil...
 
I typically don't even leave my house on the day after Thanksgiving. I'm claustrophobic and I have anxiety and panic attacks. The last thing I need to do is go out and try and shop in that. I'll be doing my holiday shopping online, or on Mondays with my daughter's father.
 
anathelia said:
I typically don't even leave my house on the day after Thanksgiving. I'm claustrophobic and I have anxiety and panic attacks. The last thing I need to do is go out and try and shop in that. I'll be doing my holiday shopping online, or on Mondays with my daughter's father.
Click to expand...
Yeah I'm doing the same thing as you. I'm all done picking out what I want. Now to see what they advertise on Monday for them will be interesting.
 
Anathelia you weren't far off...

Black Friday (sometimes Green Friday) is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. The term dates back to at least 1966, although its usage was primarily on the East coast. The term has become more common in other parts of the country since 2000. Because Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday in November in the United States, Black Friday occurs between the 23rd and the 29th of November. According to Reuters, in 2007 135 million people participated in the Black Friday shopping rush.[1]
Black Friday is not an official holiday, but as many workers have the day off as part of the Thanksgiving holiday, this increases the number of potential shoppers. Retailers often decorate for the Christmas and holiday season weeks beforehand. Many retailers open extremely early, with most of the retailers typically opening at 5AM or even earlier. Some of the larger retailers (depending on the location) such as Sears, Best Buy, Macy's, Toys "R" Us, Walmart, and Target have been reported to open as early as midnight on the start of Black Friday in localized areas and remain open for 24 hours throughout the day until midnight the following Saturday. Upon opening, retailers offer doorbuster deals and loss leaders to draw people to their stores. Although Black Friday, as the first shopping day after Thanksgiving, has served as the unofficial beginning of the Christmas season at least since the start of the modern Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, the term "Black Friday" has been traced back only to the 1960s.
The term "Black Friday" may have originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving (see Origin of the name "Black Friday" below). More recently, merchants and the media have used it instead to refer to the beginning of the period in which retailers go from being in the red (i.e., posting a loss on the books) to being in the black (i.e., turning a profit).
 
Black Friday as a term has been used in multiple contexts, going back to the nineteenth century, where it was associated with a financial crisis in 1869. The earliest known reference to "Black Friday" in this sense was made by Bonnie Taylor-Blake of the American Dialect Society, in a 1966 publication on the day's significance in Philadelphia:
JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.[13]
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The term Black Friday began to get wider exposure around 1975, as shown by two newspaper articles from November 29, 1975, both datelined Philadelphia. The first reference is in an article entitled "Army vs. Navy: A Dimming Splendor," in The New York Times:
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.
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The derivation is also clear 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."
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Usage of the term has become more common in the Midwest since 2000.
 
What a good idea...

Our big discount shopping day is Boxing Day....which is pretty useless unless your one of these people that does their shopping a year early:willy_nilly:
 
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