Black Friday 2018 will take place on 23 November this year and Cyber Monday falls on 26 November.
Cyber Monday is the first Monday after Black Friday, and sees online stores offering big discounts in an attempt to get more customers to shop online. It is not clear as to which stores will be giving Zimbabweans some big discounts especially after what happened with the Bond note recently.
The problem in Zimbabwe is that most banks have discontinued the international payments option because of the bond notes. One hopes that the Nostro accounts will help Zimbabwean shoppers on 23 and 26 November.
The well known 'Black Friday' in Zimbabwe at least from those born in Rhodesia is when the then strong Zimbabwe dollar on 14 November 1997 plunged a record 72% against the United State dollar, an episode widely regarded as the precursor of its subsequent economic meltdown.
Under pressure after street protests by former guerrillas who were demanding payment for their role in the 1970s liberation struggle, President Robert Mugabe ordered unbudgeted payouts for 50 000 of the war veterans.
The Zimbabwe dollar fell by 71,5% against the greenback, while the stock market crashed by 46% as investors rushed for the United States dollar.
Since then, it's been downhill all the way, with inflation the highest in the world and widespread shortages of basic commodities in a country that had been a regional breadbasket.
Last yes Edgards customers received a treat when a retail clothing chain reduced prices by up to 75 % in celebration of Black Friday.
Shoppers stormed Edgars as early as 8am yesterday in celebration of the Black Friday culture, which is normally associated with Western countries such as United States and Britain.
The country's largest clothing retailer committed to Black Friday 2018 - from clothes , lingerie, homeware and footwear, with a fulfilment of great deals from all age groups.
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday is an informal name for the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, the fourth Thursday of November, which has been regarded as the beginning of the country's Christmas shopping season since 1952.
Most major retailers open very early, as early as overnight hours, and offer promotional sales. Black Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some other states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday, such as Columbus Day.[2] Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend, makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers.
Black Friday has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States since 2005,[3] although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate,[4] have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time.[5] Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback.
The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".
Origin of the term
For centuries, the adjective "black" has been applied to days upon which calamities occurred. Many events have been described as "Black Friday", although the most significant such event in American History was the Panic of 1869, which occurred when financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk took advantage of their connections with the Grant Administration in an attempt to corner the gold market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold, which halted the run and caused prices to drop by eighteen percent. Fortunes were made and lost in a single day, and the president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined.
The earliest known use of "Black Friday" to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurs in the journal, Factory Management and Maintenance, for November 1951, and again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, in order to have a four-day weekend. However, this use does not appear to have caught on. Around the same time, the terms "Black Friday" and "Black Saturday" came to be used by the police in Philadelphia and Rochester to describe the crowds and traffic congestion accompanying the start of the Christmas shopping season. In 1961, the city and merchants of Philadelphia attempted to improve conditions, and a public relations expert recommended rebranding the days, "Big Friday" and "Big Saturday"; but these terms were quickly forgotten.
Use of the phrase spread slowly, first appearing in The New York Times on November 29, 1975, in which it still refers specifically to "the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year" in Philadelphia. Although it soon became more widespread, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1985 that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were still unaware of the term.
As the phrase gained national attention in the early 1980s, merchants objecting to the use of a derisive term to refer to one of the most important shopping days of the year suggested an alternative derivation: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving.[8] When this was recorded in the financial records, once-common accounting practices would use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be "in the red", instead taking in the year's profits. The earliest known published reference to this explanation occurs in The Philadelphia Inquirer for November 28, 1981.[85]
In 2013, an internet rumor alleged that the phrase originated in the American south before the Civil War, from the practice of selling slaves on the day after Thanksgiving. This was debunked by Snopes.com in 2015.[81] Although the modern American holiday of Thanksgiving is associated with the founding of Plymouth Colony in 1620, a similar annual day of thanksgiving was stipulated in the royal charter of Jamestown Colony in 1607.
infographic credit: Webmastersjury
