Black Friday is an American holiday that has spread around the world. Its celebration takes place just the day after Thanksgiving that is always celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. This year, Black Friday will be on November 25th.
This date marks the start of the Christmas shopping season, with significant discounts in many stores and department stores.
From the early hours of Friday morning and for three days, millions of consumers cram the world’s shops, as the tradition has been spreading. In addition, some years businesses promote online sales, with the so – called “Cyber Monday”.
Black Friday originally referred to the stock market crisis of the nineteenth century. In the United States, the term was first used on September 24th, 1860, when Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to take the gold market on the New York Stock Exchange. When the government was forced to intervene to correct the distortion by increasing the supply of raw material in the market, prices fell and many investors lost big fortunes.
In addition, the name “Black Friday” began to popularize in Philadelphia around 1961, where it was used to describe the heavy traffic of vehicles and pedestrians during the day after Thanksgiving. Its use became more general around 1975 and was baptized Black Friday at commercial level because thanks to the sales of that day, many stores that were in “red numbers” (financially) managed to arrive at black numbers.
In Costa Rica, every year more shops join this tradition and many Costa Ricans wait since the night before in the malls to take advantage of the juicy offers.