Black Friday queues outside Currys PC World. It all looks remarkably civilised!

This Friday isn’t any old Friday. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have probably have heard that it’s Black Friday – the day after US Thanksgiving which has come to herald the start of Christmas shopping. It’s usually the case that anything that’s big in the US tends to be big over here. And Black Friday is no exception.

After an inauspicious arrival in the UK in 2013 (which saw very little interest from the British public), the following year saw rather too much interest from British bargain hunters resulting in virtual riots in several supermarkets, particularly over super cheap flat screen TVs (mostly badged Polaroid).

Since then, the phenomenon has grown slowly but surely with more of an emphasis on online sales and also focusing over a longer period rather than just a day in order to prevent more mindless violence over consumer goods.

I was asked to give a quote for the Argos website about Black Friday for its website which you can see below. I also thought I’d write a piece on the origins of Black Friday for Shiny Shiny.

These, it seems are still open to some debate, despite the official version of events telling us that the term Black Friday comes from when retailers collectively move out of making a loss (in the red) to turning a profit (in the black).