Black Friday

It's always amusing to see how far the PR campaign works it way into the media. Today is of course Black Friday - or at least it would be if the UK had a Black Friday being defined as the day after Thanksgiving, which we don't have.

Anyway according to the i newspaper Black Friday is so called because it's the first time that the retailers make a profit i.e. use black ink rather than red; according to the BBC it's a tradition in America. Yeah; um no.

It was called Black Friday for the same reason the Euro had Black Wednesday - it was bad; with the first reported use in this context coming from Philadelphia indicating it was a police term used to describe the mass of traffic the city experienced on this day. The positive (?) tone only came about in 1981.

So although the start of the sales may be deemed to have started on the day after Thanksgiving in the USA and been so since the date became fixed in 1863. The tradition of 'Black Friday' in its current manifestation dates from 1981. Whoo-hoo 30 year old tradition.

I'd expect some better fact-checking from the Independent and the BBC