Black Friday 2008 Sales Roundup

by Terri Potratz | November 17, 2008 at 10:21 am

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Sale ads and coupons for Black Friday 2008 are popping up as major retailers in the US, such as Target, Sears, Macy's and Walmart, are hosting massive doorbuster sales with some slick deals. Held on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday falls on November 28 this year.

Early-bird deals are notorious for selling out quickly, so Black Friday typically involves shoppers standing in long line-ups starting the evening before the sale or very early in the morning, and with the power of the internet and sites like Deal Alert know exactly what they're after before they even set foot in store.

Cyber Monday is also tied into Black Friday as it occurs on the following Monday. Although the popular sale items are usually gone by this point, many retailers still offer discounts up to and including this day.

A number of websites are aggregating Black Friday sale ads:

Black Friday is known as the day that kicks off the Christmas shopping season in the US, and most retailers open around 5am or earlier for their doorbuster sales so people can get a head start on discounted gifts. Sales used to be held in-store only, but many larger merchants have extended the Black Friday sales to their online stores as well - though these items also sell out fairly quickly.

Black Friday is one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year when looking at customer traffic numbers - in terms of sales volume, Black Friday and the Saturday before Christmas Day often compete for first place.

The term "Black Friday" was coined in reference to the stock market crash of 1929, Black Tuesday:

The earliest uses of "Black Friday" come from or reference Philadelphia and refer to the heavy traffic on that day, an implicit comparison to the extremely stressful and chaotic experience of Black Tuesday (the 1929 stock-market crash). The earliest known reference to "Black Friday" (in this sense), found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake of the American Dialect Society, refers to Black Friday 1965 and makes the Philadelphia origin explicit:

JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.

Happy shopping!

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