Thanksgiving Day is fast approaching and that also means that Black Friday and Cyber Monday is also around the corner. This year in particular will be a very different one from all the previous years we have done the two biggest shopping days of the year because of the pandemic.

But where (and when) exactly did the terms “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” come from?

(image source: bloomberg.com)

Black Friday dates back to Philadelphia in the 1960s where newspapers in the state used the term to describe the massive frenzy of crowds at stores and the congestion of traffic that happens on the day after Thanksgiving. The crowd frenzy was paralleled after the original “Black Friday”, which was a stock market panic on September 24, 1869, where the price of gold collapsed due to then-President Ulysses Grant’s interference on the scheme of three investors: Jay Gould, James Fisk, and President Grant’s own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin.

(image source: abc7.com)

Cyber Monday, however, is a much newer term that was coined by Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation and Scott Silverman, and was used as a marketing term for the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. It was created as a digital counterpart to Black Friday to encourage people to do online shopping and has rapidly become the biggest ecommerce event in the US, whereas Black Friday is more of a brick-and-mortar sale event. 

However, with the pandemic happening right now, Black Friday will probably shift to a bigger online event than it was before rather than doing the traditional in-store sales retailers have done in previous years. So definitely watch out in the coming weeks for upcoming deals and bundles for Black Friday and Cyber Monday at onlinecarstereo.com and subscribe to our newsletter to receive weekly promotions and save tons of cash!