Going Bald 1
From tearing my hair out every time a media outlet glibly refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving as “the biggest shopping day of the year,” as if that were revealed truth.
It’s not and never has been. Big, yes. Never the “biggest.”
If they can’t get that right from readily available statistics, why do we expect them to get complicated stuff, like noticing when a politician is out-and-out lying, right?
Aside: I did not hear the Friday after Thanksgiving called “Black Friday” until I moved to the Philadelphia area in 1983. Even 135 miles away in Washington, D. C., where I had lived for nine years, the term was unknown in that contest. Even in Philly, it had little to do directly with shopping.
It had to do with traffic. The Wikipedia article is pretty accurate.
November 28, 2009 at 9:36 pm
I heard a discussion on Bloomberg Radio about the claim that it’s called “Black Friday” because it’s the day retail businesses get in the black for the year. The consensus of the financial experts was if that were true, most of the businesses would not have made it through the first 10+ months of the year. It proves that if you say something loud enough and long enough, people will believe it.