A Complete History Of Black Friday
Zacks Investment Research | Nov 21, 2018 06:00AM ET
Black Friday shopping has become vital to retailers big and small throughout the U.S. Giants including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Walmart (NYSE:WMT) roll out sales and deals early to entice shoppers. So, let’s look at what to expect from Black Friday this year and dive into the history of both the shopping holiday extravaganza and the phrase.
2018
The National Retail Federation predicts that holiday retail sales will jump as much as 4.8% to reach $720.89 billion in 2018. We should note that this comes after last year’s holiday retail sales popped 5.3% to hit $687.87 billion.
The NRF also recently announced that 164 million people plan to go shopping during the five-day Thanksgiving shopping holiday weekend that includes Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and the American Express (NYSE:AXP) -backed Small Business Saturday. Out of the five days, Black Friday is projected to be the busiest, followed by Cyber Monday.
U.S. consumer confidence rose in October to an almost two-decade high, which is part of the reason that many expect a strong showing from retailers this season. Yet, the recent market downturn hurt Macy’s (NYSE:M) and Walmart stock despite strong quarterly performances. Target (NYSE:TGT) , on the other hand, posted an earnings miss Tuesday that helped send its shares down over 10%.
Now it’s time to dive into the history of Black Friday.
1860s Gold Crisis
Black Friday, as its name might suggest, originally marked an awful day for the U.S. economy. The phrase initially referred to the day the American gold market crashed on September 24, 1869.
As the story goes, two Wall Street financial speculators, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, bought up as much gold as they could in hopes of driving up U.S. gold prices and selling their positions at a massive profit.
When things got out of hand, President Ulysses S. Grant decided to have the U.S. Treasury sell $4 million worth of gold on the next trading day. News circulated quickly, which caused Wall Street and the stock market to tumble. “Possibly no avalanche ever swept with more terrible violence,” the New York Herald later Zacks Investment Research
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