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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry and if you're new here, Cult Leader is a podcast about Cult and Moida and everything in between.

How's everyone doing? It's Monday. Are we ready for the week? Are we gearing up for the week? Are you ready to go out there and girlboss this week into the growl?

I can't believe it's really about to be December. Where did this year go? This year definitely went by very fast in comparison to last year. I feel like I'm ready for it. I'm ready to put on my favorite Christmas records. Just got a really good one. I got the new, well, it's definitely not new.

New to me, Elephids Gerald Christmas record and I've been listening to that and starting to get things in order over here, feeling pumped. I had a nice time with my family on Friday. I was editing this coffee shop in Palm Springs and my dad's like, oh, I'll go with you. I think you wanted to get out of the house. So we went down to this coffee shop that we go to sometimes when we're down there. And I was like working on my computer and my dad was brought his iPad with him and he was like watching movies or whatever on it.

It felt like I had like a kid with me like I was a parent with my child and I'm like, okay, just play on your iPad. And then when I'm done with my work, we can go do something. He was restless. I'm telling you, 40 minutes into sitting there. And he's like, hey, how much you got left? And I was like, you know, just give me like 30ish more minutes, 10 minutes later. He's like, okay, I'm gonna actually run to home depot. I'll be back. So I was like, okay.

Restless parents can't live with them. Can't live without them. No, it was a good time. I feel like December between work and social stuff is really filling up.

It's gonna be a pretty crazy month, but I'm excited for it. I think I genuinely enjoy the holidays. Yeah. So hopefully we have a very coolty December, a very coolty Christmas.

But if I just started putting my podcast on vinyl, I'm like, collectors edition. Come on, who would buy it? Let's see. This week we are doing what I call a list episode where we go over several stories that share a common thread instead of just doing one big story.

However, every list episode kind of has one main story within it. But for example, in the past we've done, we did a list episode on failed Doomsday predictions. Halloween, we did the trick or treating stories. In last week's little leader, I gave you a hint. And that hint was the tickle.

The almost story that I talked about in the beginning kind of set us up for today. So today we are going to be getting into a little bit of the history behind one of the wildest shopping days in America. And of course, we are going to be talking about some real life instances of horror and terror that took place as a result of said shopping day.

The day in question, what Black Friday, of course. But we meet on Mondays over here. That's when our cult meetings are. So cyber Monday was the next best thing for those listening in other countries where this is not a thing.

The real simple version of Black Friday or how I would describe it is it's always the Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday and stores run these big sales. And it's gotten to the point where some retailers even open up on Thursday night or the wee hours of Friday morning in order to try and implement some sort of, I don't know why they open earlier now.

I guess for crowd control or more realistically to act like they're doing something wild for their customers like we opened up early for you guys. So you can come and give us your money. Do you love that?

Thoughts and prayers to anyone who has worked retail on Black Friday seems like a nightmare when I was younger and a lot of my friends worked at retail stores. They would come back with horrifying stories. And I can only imagine nowadays. I mean, the Karen, the Karen's are out and about.

I thought it would be fun to do a little digging into the history of the origins of Black Friday before we get into our stories just so we all have a better understanding of how and why it existed the first place. And to be honest, I was really curious.

Once I decided that I was going to do this as an episode, I was like, why is Black Friday a thing? When did that start? I know it dates back quite some time. And I'm sure the 1800s girl A's weren't lining up outside of Walmart for a flat screen.

So we are going to first do a little deep dive there and then get into our stories. Now there's several different origin stories for Black Friday. But the most common one that I came across is in relation to the retailers themselves where stories would often quote fall into the red after operating at a partial loss throughout the year.

And then in order to make up what they hadn't sold through the year, they just discounted everything and then made a ton of sales to put their numbers back in the positive being the Black. So like, you know, when you look at a graph or you look at a paper and it's like some things in the red, it's usually in the negative, not doing great. But then once it's in the Black, you know, it's good to go.

History.com says this is the official sanctioned origin story, but it's inaccurate. I guess the real story is that back in the 50s Philadelphia police used the term Black Friday to describe the chaos that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving when drones of tourist and locals alike would flood into Philadelphia ahead of the annual Army and Navy football game.

None of the officers were ever able to take that Friday off every year because of the crowds and the traffic and it was just utter chaos. So they started calling it Black Friday in an effort to rebrand the negative connotations behind Black Friday.

The stores in the area started trying to call it Big Friday in the 60s, but it didn't stick. By the 80s, retailers once again reinvented the whole concept of Black Friday, this time successfully by implementing discounts and making a ton of sales.

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