The History of Black Friday

Olisa Ausara-Lasaru

 

This past friday, tons of people across the US were up early to catch this year’s wave of Bblack Ffriday sales. The tradition has been in place for so long that most people have forgotten where the idea of Bblack Ffriday actually originates from. Black friday  traces back all the way to the mid 1800’s, when two speculators, named Jay Gould and James Fisk, created a big growth in gold prices, by skyrocketing the prices, and earning a huge profit. However, on Ffriday, the scheme started to fail, and the stock market began to cause everyone to go bankrupt. The stock market crashed, causing prices to fall 20% , and the disruption with the gold prices caused other agricultural products to plummet about 50%. The possible link to this morphing into the idea of Bblack Ffriday was the huge profit, and then the lowering of the prices right after. Another correlation with Bblack Ffriday and Tthanksgiving is the Thanksgiving parade that a Canadian department store called Eaton put on every year, and it became increasingly more popular. It even inspired Macy’s to start their own thanksgiving parade after seeing the success that Eaton had. Macy’s Thanksgiving parade boosted shopping the next day due to the popularity of the parade, and naturally the earned a huge profit with that increase in shoppers.

http://www.history.com/news/the-black-friday-gold-scandal-145-years-ago

https://www.macys.com/social/parade/

 

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