COLUMNISTS November 27 was Black Friday in the US. This is not to be confused with Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday or Black Thursday. The latter are black because of various economic disasters: the US stock market crashes of October 19 1987 (Monday) and October 29 1929 (Tuesday); Black Wednesday was when John Major’s government withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992; and Black Thursday was when the US stock market began its slide in 1929, which culminated in the Tuesday crash. And though there is a Black Friday that also relates to economics, when the US gold market collapsed in 1869, that usage is mainly confined to the history books.
November 27’s Black Friday was black because, theoretically, it is the day the balance sheets of American stores go into the black, thanks to the crazed shopping of consumers using the Thanksgiving break to do their holiday gift buying. To get consumers through the doors, the stores use the Thanksgiving holiday for some equally crazed one- or two-day discounting. In other words, these days, when you hear the words “Black Friday”, you don’t need to worry about your stock portfolio, just your credit card balance.
With the retail Black Friday, though, I find the discrepancy in meaning odd. You’d think, upon hearing the phrase, that Black Friday should refer to a bad day (like a market crash), not a fun, shop-till-you-drop, day. Of course, the nomenclature is relative. “Black” could refer to the sudden crash of your personal liquidity levels; according to a new study of 2,011 consumers by American Express, this holiday season “10 per cent of consumers actually intend to open their wallets and spend more on holiday gifts relative to last year ... in the next 30 days, more than one in five US consumers (22 per cent) expect to spend more when compared to the last 30-day period.”
Or there’s another possibility: “black” could refer to the mood of department store sales staff, going by a new book, Retail Hell , by Freeman Hall, a former high-end department store salesman. According to Hall, working in a store is so awful – because of crazy customers, competitive, client-stealing sales assistants, and image-focused owners – that presumably any day that ups the ante of potential sales and potential disasters in these stores is a bad day.
But it’s not just sales assistants or shoppers who are calling it Black Friday. It’s everyone. Which makes me think that either we are having a collective failure of imagination and that we haven’t focused on the fact we are confusing meanings – or it could be a piece of fall-out from the fashion world. Because in fashion, after all, black is the business. So it makes sense to name the day you do the most business after the shade that most often rakes in the money.
Yet, what does it really say about attitudes to shopping itself? It certainly doesn’t paint it in the most positive light, no matter what you happen to think of black as a colour. Personally, for example, I embrace the shade – black makes up a large part of my wardrobe along with its related tones, grey and white. But while I celebrate it on my body for a number of reasons logical or not (it provides a backdrop for my thoughts, it makes it easy to dress in the morning, it shows off my hair), I don’t extend this to its descriptive power when related to anything other than the Pantone wheel.
Black is a term of literary and emotional darkness, and to use it as a modifier is to imbue the term it is modifying with less-than-salubrious connotations (and that’s not even taking into account the complicated politics of race).
The implication, really, of calling a big shopping day a black day is “shopping = bad”. No wonder it’s an American term; it captures the duality of the US attitude to consumption pretty much perfectly. The country is full of mea culpas about irresponsible purchasing (of houses, cars, dresses); on the other hand, spending is positioned as a patriotic activity.
This is not nearly as much of an issue in many European countries, which do not have Black Fridays and generally do not start their sales until after Christmas or at new year. In France, all sales begin on the same, government-mandated day – this year January 6 – and last for the same period. Perhaps, as a result, there is less holiday retail frenzy and less holiday retail guilt. And perhaps this is why, in a town hall meeting called by the Council of Fashion Designers of America last summer aimed at helping fashion out of the recession, Anna Wintour, the British editor of American Vogue, suggested the idea of mandated sales periods.
It sounded pretty good, until Diane von Furstenberg, CFDA president, pointed out that the idea was “illegal” – at least according to Washington’s antitrust rules. It seems we can live with the contra-logic of Black Friday, but not with blackening fashion’s good name.
vanessa.friedman@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/friedman
