The United States has created many cultural institutions which have spread around the world.

People all over the earth have enjoyed and benefited from rock and roll,

Hollywood films, and the internet.

However, we've also created some things that have spread to other countries,

which, to be totally honest, are probably not our best look.

Learn more about Black Friday, the surprising history of the term,

and how it manifests itself around the world today

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. thing everywhere daily. The daily. The term Black Friday as it's used today refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States.

It's given special attention because it's considered to be the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

American Thanksgiving falls approximately one month before Christmas.

And because it always falls on a Thursday, many people have the following Friday off from work.

That means that there are lots of people who are able to go shopping.

The Christmas shopping season has traditionally been the biggest sales period of

the year and the term black comes from the accounting tradition of using black ink to represent

positive values and red ink to represent negative values.

So Black Friday is the day, or at least begins the season, where retail stores become profitable or go into the black.

Or at least that's the modern use of the word. The phrase Black Friday however goes back much earlier.

While it didn't initially refer to retail shopping, it did have an economic association. The word black in a business sense

has always had a mixed meaning. In an accounting sense, being in the black was good.

However, market crashes were often also referred to as Black,

such as Black Tuesday when the stock market crashed in 1929.

The first Black Friday occurred in 1869.

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