Jim and I spent the afternoon with our youngest daughter. She braved the hordes and was at Wal-Mart at its opening of the Black Friday sales with her girlfriend this morning after breakfast at Denny's. She described her bargain of a $20 hd and a $20 printer and said when she nabbed the deals she had to "swim through a tide of leeches" to get out. I cracked up.

 

Just to show you how horrible this whole Black Friday episode is, here's something I heard on the radio.

At a Wal-mart in Oceanside, NY, a part time employee went to open the doors at 5:00 am to let the crowd in. As soon as he opened the doors, the rush of people stampeded in, trampling him to death. Worse still, the stampede didn't stop. The bargain hunters kept stampeding in, continuing to trample over his body.

I think I heard that Wal-mart eventually closed the store for a short period of time, to remove his body, but it reopened later in the day.

 

I spent the day on my fall yardwork and picked up the copy of my PSA bloodtest.

If I can think of something that we really want, I'll go for the after Christmas sales.

 

From what I've always heard, which I believe to be correct, the true origin of the term comes from the fact that most retailers do 65 to 80% of their total annual business in the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas. That being the case, it is in this period that they make their profit for the year, hence the red ink (loss) turns to black ink (profit). Black Friday is not the day that they make their profit but rather it is the first day of the period within which they make their profit.

The biggest business period and most profitable period of the year for most retailers was traditionally the day after Thanksgiving until December 31 of the year.

Traditionally, most retailers who have been in trouble have tried everything in their power to survive until after Christmas. I don't have any statistics on this, but using my years and experience in the clothing industry I can tell you that for the most part that most retailers who are going to close up and/or disappear do it in January and February, after having sold as much inventory as possible during the Christmas shopping season.

 

That's the most sensible explanation -- that the ink turns black on the Friday after Thanksgiving, finally, for a lot of retailers. And, more than anything else, I think this choice points out one of the weaknesses of Wikipedia -- it's just not able to provide authoritative answers. Still, I seem to be using it more and more -- it's so easy that it's irresistable.

And that Wal-mart business is certainly disturbing. How long is it going to be before the crowd figures out it can just storm out of the store like it stormed in? And Black Friday looting is born. HPH

 

An aside to all of this is that red ink is not, nor was it ever an accounting standard. It is not necessary nor is it an accounting standard to show a loss in red on financial statements.

This tradition came about in the 1800s when ledgers were handwritten. In order to make it easier to see a loss in the books, accountants and bookkeepers (clerks in England) started to use red ink. This led to the term for a loss as being in the red, and ultimately led to red being representative of a loss. We generally use negative numbers to represent a loss. For most accountants the standard is numbers surrounded by parenthesis. So if you see a number looking like this ($1,000,000) on your personal income statement or statement of cash flows you've got a big problem regardless of it's color.

Typically, we use red in our workpapers today for ticking, checking and indexing simply because the color stands out.

Sorry about the off topic comment. Now back on topic.

 

[QUOTE=ralper,Nov 28 2008, 09:10 PM] An aside to all of this is that red ink is not, nor was it ever an accounting standard.

 

No kidding! I supposed she's never heard of the phrase 'pot calling the kettle black'

 

More on the store employee trampled to death. Read this, it's more frightening than I thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/bu...almart.html?hp

 

Trust me Black Friday looting started a long time ago, its alive and well.