Black Friday 2012: Facts, Figures and Frantic Shoppers
- 147 million people are expected to shop this Thanksgiving weekend
- Stores are expected to make a total of $11.4 billion on Black Friday
- The average spend per customer is expected to be $398
- In 2008, Walmart employee Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death on Black Friday when shoppers at Green Acres Shopping Center, Valley Street, New York pushed the doors open and streamed inside. Paramedics who arrived to help him were also trampled and seriously injured
- Last year, two dozen shoppers at a Walmart in California were pepper sprayed as Elizabeth Macias, 33, battled them for reduced video games
Stores are expected to make a total of $11.4 billion on Black Friday 2012
- “Black Friday” is believed to be the day retailers get “in the black” because of the profits they make. But the term was first used in January 1966, when Bonnie Taylor-Black of the American Dialect Society wrote: “Black Friday is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. Black Friday officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.”
- According to Google Trends, people started widely searching online for “Black Friday” on October 14
- Some eager shoppers have been camping out at a Best Buy in California since November 12 – that’s 11 days before doors opened
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