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BLACK FRIDAY WHERE AND WHEN

I have heard the term "black Friday" for almost fifty years because I lived in Philadelphia in the 60's. Well part of them.

Philadelphia had a classically bad commuting problem. The Schuylkill Expressway which wandered along the river of the same name and drove people nuts every morning. "The Surekill Expressway".

Most people, who could, used public transit. But once a year, the people from the suburbs would merge with the commuters on the Expressway for a horrible day called Black Friday.

The DJs and traffic reporters started it and then it was taken up in the retail trade as the rush on the day after Thanksgiving.

For a long time, Black Friday stayed in Philadelphia but over the years, other cities adopted the term for the day and the meaning morphed to the day all the stores went into the black or that your own local rush hour went to hell or something far from the original meaning.

And now every year people relearn the origins and write blog articles about it.

The Real Story About Black Friday

As a partly Philadelphian I am proud to say that Kevin Drum is right.

And I have always, always, always, stayed home on the day.

I do hear that the Expressway, now I-76 is a different animal than in the 60s. It is widened and conforms to I-standards. And, I hear that is still gets clogged like every other expressway in the US on the day after Thanksgiving.

Labels: holidays, Pennsylvania