It’s Black Friday, 2012. I was asked yesterday why it’s called “Black Friday” with the suggestion that such an ominous-sounding name seemed incongruous with the commercial aspirations of the day. Back before it was known to the public, store owners and manufacturers used to use this term; for many of them, the day after Thanksgiving, being the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season, marked the day their business would move “out of the red” (in other words, show a profit) for the year. The term was seized upon by the mega-big-box retailers like Walmart as a marketing gimmick, inverting its meaning to apply to the customers rather than the business owners.
