They call it Black Friday. No one is supposed to get hurt on Black Friday but yet some still do. There isn’t supposed to be chaos and riots on Black Friday but yet there is. There isn’t supposed to be businesses surviving or closing based on Black Friday but they do. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States and it is the day that the government officially begins keeping track of Xmas revenues. Xmas revenues are the business numbers generated between Black Friday and Christmas Eve and they are the single most important numbers retailers will ever keep an eye on. Xmas revenues always make the top of the business news reports because they are so vital to the survival of most United States retailers but even more important than that Xmas revenues are an excellent indicator of how the American public feels about spending their money. If there ever was a time that you can be assured that Americans will spend their extra cash and give economists an indication of what consumer confidence it like it is the Christmas season. That short period of one month does more to affect the economic outlook of the entire nation’s economy than almost any other single event. Xmas revenues may not directly change the economy but they certainly give an excellent indication as to whether or not the American public is willing to put money back into the economy or whether or not we could be in for a shrinking economy.

As was mentioned before Xmas revenues begin being counted on Black Friday. It used to be that Black Friday was a family thing where stores would put out circulars the week before announcing some great deals for only the morning of Black Friday and you had to be there to get those deals. Many retailers also offered small gifts like Christmas ornaments or something like that. But as Xmas revenues become serious business and more and more competition started to spring up for Black Friday shoppers the rules suddenly started to change. Retailers began to use television advertising to attract people to their sales on Black Friday and the gifts started to become more and more elaborate. Then retailers came to the conclusion that if they were open first on Black Friday then they would surely get all the shoppers so the stores started opening at 5:30am, then 4:30am, and it has gotten to the point where many retailers now open at 12:01am on Black Friday and they are met with a line of shoppers extending for hundreds of yards! The specials that they offer are amazing sometimes. A 20” flat panel color television set was a popular Black Friday special in 2006. There have been $18 VCRs and then later on they turned into $18 DVD players. There were specials that no one could turn down and soon the crowds were getting bigger and more unruly.

In 2006 a woman was trampled as her local Wal-Mart opened its doors for Black Friday. Two more people were trampled in a different Wal-Mart on the same morning. Best Buy stores reportedly got so many people in 2006 that they had to call in police to help them enforce a policy of only a certain amount of people in the store at a time to reduce damage to store merchandise and the reduce the possibility of theft. Xmas revenues have become so important that they are becoming a craze not only with retailers but with consumers as well. With the advent of the internet less and less people are shopping at stores but yet Black Friday continues to get more and more popular. It is hard to say what retail stores will do to try and reclaim some of the business they are losing to the internet but you can rest assured that it will involve Xamas revenues in some way.