Five Things You Don ’t Know About Black Friday

Black Friday is coming.

The day after Thanksgiving. Beginning of the Christmas season. Biggest shopping day of the year.

But you know that already.

Here are five things you don’t know about Black Friday.

Where the name comes from–

The first people to call the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday were Philadelphia cops.

“Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday,” Denny Griswold wrote in a public relations newsletter in 1961.

“Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country’s most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday.”

Renaming the “holiday” didn’t work, obviously. Black Friday it is, from now until the end of shopping.

The staggering sales figures–

Last year, American shoppers spent more than 50 billion dollars over the Black Friday weekend.

That’s one-and-a-half times the GDP of Montana.

It’s more than twice the GDP of Malta and 35 times the GDP of Belize.

Belize is a small country. We know. But still. 35 times.

It’s not just for Americans anymore–

Black Friday is now observed, if that’s the right word, in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil, South Africa, India, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Norway and France.

The day after Thanksgiving is meaningless in all of those countries. Thanksgiving is an American holiday. (Canada has its own Thanksgiving, but it’s celebrated six weeks earlier. And interestingly enough, Liberia also celebrates Thanksgiving, as it was founded by freed American slaves in 1847, but they don’t have Black Friday yet.)

Those countries imported Black Friday because, why not? Merchants make more money and shoppers get some steep discounts. Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except for the unlucky ones. Which leads us to:

The staggering body count–

Okay, the body count isn’t exactly staggering, but the fact that there’s any kind of a body count for a shopping holiday is pretty outrageous.

42 Million Dead In Bloodiest Black Friday Weekend On Record, The Onion reported in 2012. “First responders reporting from retail stores all across the nation said the record-breaking post-Thanksgiving shopping spree carnage began as early as midnight on Friday, when 13 million shoppers were reportedly trampled, pummeled, burned, stabbed, shot, lanced, and brutally beaten to death while attempting to participate in early holiday sales events.”

Yeah, that’s The Onion. It’s a joke.

Seriously, though stampeding, pummeling, and brutally beating to decide who gets the last discounted flat screen are par for the course now. According to the website blackfridaydeathcount.com, the casualties are now up to 7 dead and 98 wounded.

Two people were actually shot at a Toys ‘r Us in Palm Desert, California. Two more were shot outside a Wal-mart in Tallahassee, and another guy was shot in the leg while hauling a huge-screen TV to his car in Las Vegas.

If you find yourself thinking, “only in America,” hold your horses. The chaos is spreading now to Great Britain.

Last year, all sorts of people got trampled at a Wal-mart in London. The whole thing was captured on video. Manchester police arrested several people for assault. Witnesses said their fellow Brits behaved “like animals” and turned shopping centers into “war zones.”

But it’s all part of the fun as long as you aren’t the next person who gets trampled or shot.

You don’t have to leave home anymore–

You don’t have to go out. Stay home if you want.

No more pushing, shoving, hair-pulling or shooting. No more spending the night in the parking lot of a Wal-mart. No more trips to the hospital or arrests on your record.

You can get your Black Friday deals right here on the Internet.

Amazon has plenty of them. So do Target and Best Buy.

But last year, online sales accounted for only four percent of the Black Friday totals.

So while you can stay home and do your Christmas shopping in jammies and slippers, that’s not exactly the spirit.

Go on. Brave the hordes. Knock yourself out. Get some spectacular deals.

Just try not to die.

See Your Work Through Your Audience’s Eyes

You aren’t going to connect with your customers and your audience if you can’t see your work through their eyes. Before publishing those blog posts or sending the flyers off to the printer, you need to swap your writer hat with your reader hat and look at your content as if someone else wrote it.

Easier to say than to do, of course. You wrote it. Not somebody else.

But you can get there, sort of, by following a couple of steps.

Put it on ice

Just stop for a while. Save your document, close it and stick in the freezer.

The only way you can truly read your work as if someone else wrote it is to wait a long time. Like a year. And that’s obviously not going to happen. But the longer you can wait, the fresher your words will appear.

Read something else

You need a palette cleanser, though. If you pause a few minutes while drinking coffee, you’ll still taste the coffee even if nothing’s in your mouth. If you have a sip of water, you’ll still taste the coffee. If you want to stop tasting coffee, brush your teeth. Or eat a pickle. Your tongue needs a reset.

Your brain needs a reset, too, or there’s no chance you’ll see your own writing objectively.

So go read something else. And read something totally different. If you’re been working on a piece of content marketing all day, don’t read somebody else’s content marketing. Read a Jack Reacher novel. Try the sports page, some poetry, or the Huffington Post. Anything but copywriting and content marketing.

Write something else

Even better, write something else. That will really give you some distance.

Even if you work on something else for only an hour or two, your other piece of writing will look and feel a little bit alien all of a sudden. Almost as if someone else wrote it.

Go to bed

Your subconscious never sleeps. It’s always chewing on things. Solving problems. Turning things over. Coming up with solutions. It also moves on to other things entirely and gives you some space.

Print it

Have you ever laid down on your bed with the top of your head pointing toward the floor and looked up at the ceiling? Everything’s upside-down. It’s still your bedroom, but it looks like an entirely different and unexplored place, as if you’ve never even been there before. Everything is exactly the same, only totally different.

You can have a similar experience with your writing without hanging upside down. Just adjust the margins, alter the font, and print it.

It will look like someone else wrote it. It will even feel like someone else wrote it. It will be exactly the same, only totally different. You’ll see all kinds of things that you didn’t see before, especially if in the meantime you read something else, wrote something else, and slept on it.