It's only been the last few decade, it seems, that "Black Friday" has become the common term for the most important shopping day of the year.
"Black Friday" is supposed to be a good thing, at least that's the goal for stores trying to push their year "into the black," the accounting root of the day's name.
But it's a term with historically negative connotations, dating to a "Black Friday" financial panic back in 1869.
It echoes inthe Wall Street crash on a "Black Tuesday" in 1929 that signalled the start of the Great Depression. "Black Monday" was the label given to another dangerous drop in the stock market, this one in 1987.
Steely Dan's musical tribute to the day begins: "When Black Friday comes, I'll stand down by the door, and catch the grey men when they dive from the fourteenth floor."
Is that the image you want in your head standing in line at the checkout counter, especially in the economic climate we've been in since last fall?
"Outta the Red" Friday is accurate, but doesn't have the right oomph. Profitable Friday is clunky. Crazy shoppers on a spree Friday is way too long.
Anybody got any better ideas for a new name?
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
