Gold Friday

[howeird]

Once the media latches onto a catch phrase, they never let it go no matter how stupid or inappropriate. We've just wrapped up the day in the USA when more people hit the malls and stores than any other day, when a lot of green passes hands, lots of plastic is used, and things start to become a little more golden for the retailers. So what's it being called? Black Friday.

The moniker is a combination of reverse racism and ignorance about basic bookkeeping.

The reverse racism part is simply that these days everyone seems to think that when color is mentioned, it's about race. Forget art, forget science, forget the fact that almost nobody on the planet has black (as in 000000 on the RGB color chart) skin, black = African-American. When I was growing up, one of the worst insults you give a person of that heritage was to call him/her "black".  Particularly bad events in history have traditionally been called "black" days.  But the black power movement changed all that, with the help of a slogan-mad media, so now black is a good thing to be. Fine, be proud to be black, but race has nothing to do with the day after Thanksgiving.

The bookkeeping ignorance is that the pundits who coined the phrase claim this is the day of the year when businesses start going into the black - start making a profit. But that's got to be wrong. It's only the first day of a month-long season of buying, and most people are only buying discounted items. Plus the businesses have hired more people to handle the crowds, they have invested more in the past few days on stock than up till this time, and so on.

So call it Green Friday. Or Plastic Friday. Or Gold Friday. 

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Makes sense. Over here, we used "Black Wednesday" for the mid-1990s economic gear-crunch which helped kick Major out of office.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

Whether it makes sense or not, the term was coined in Philly by the Police Department and is a reference to how much of a pain that day of the year is for them, what, with the gridlock, jaywalking, smash & grabs, etc.

You're certainly correct on the accounting part... most businesses make money every quarter of the year. Some do post losses most of the year and make it all up on the last quarter but that's not very common since one bad holiday would sink them.

I've never heard anyone make an assumption that black friday, or the other black friday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29) for that matter have anything to do about race. That's a new one.