Nows and Forevers

“This isn’t your grandmother’s Black Friday.”

That was the headline on an email for journalists that I received earlier this week, suggesting new ways to cover the faux holiday.

I wasn’t aware my grandmothers, who died in 1994 and 2011 respectively, had Black Fridays. I’m sure that they went shopping, at least my maternal grandmother, who loved to shop. But I don’t recall, growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a time when we all got up to shop on the day after Thanksgiving.

That isn’t to say we didn’t. If I remember, my mother and grandmother didn’t ever have to have an excuse to shop: My mom’s letters to my grandparents and me when she lived in Europe in the mid-80s were filled with long explanations of her shopping trips in Italy, Spain and Germany. And I certainly remember, and not with fondness, the many times I was dragged from store to store as they shopped.

But Black Friday, well, it wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about. My former wife went out with her sisters on Black Friday, hunting for deals when we lived in New York. And my stepmother went shopping with her sister. My only Black Friday experience came when I went to a Staples to get a deal on a hard drive, 20 years ago.

I started covering business in the early ‘90s, when it very much was something we covered.

I don’t think I ever covered Black Friday as a reporter, but I certainly sent photographers and reporters out on the Friday after Thanksgiving to talk to shoppers and retailers about business. The first would have been 1994, the first two months or so that I had been hired as business editor of a daily newspaper near New York City. This newspaper, which was then one of a dying breed called an afternoon newspaper, published around noon weekdays and Saturdays. We didn’t have papers on major holidays like July 4, Christmas and yes, Thanksgiving.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet — and Google News Archive — I can revisit working at those newspapers whenever I want. And on Saturday, Nov. 26, 1994, Black Friday shopping was in fact the top, above-the-fold story in my newspaper.

That holiday season, 1994, was supposed to be a better than average shopping time with about a 6% increase in holiday spending over 1993, according to the story. Christmas 1993, the country was still in the grips of the recession that sank the Bush administration. Things were overall better a year later, but The New York metro area consumers our reporter found were still pretty cautious. He called it a “mixed bag” when he surveyed shoppers on that Friday in the shopping areas of Norwalk, Connecticut, and the trendy and upscale Westport, Connecticut.

“To be honest, everyone says it’s great (the economy), but I’m not so sure,” one woman told the reporter.

I don’t have any recollection of sending the reporter and photographer out, although I know I would have. And the next year, 1995, I did that again — and once again, Black Friday shopping was above the fold. But it was a slightly different story for Christmas 1995: The predictions going into the holiday season were for a drop of 11% on Christmas shopping that year.

“Shoppers are being more careful by looking for quality goods and hunting bargains,” the story said.

But neither the 1994 nor the 1995 stories had the words “Black Friday.” I don’t really ever recall using those words back in the ‘90s. Nor did the stories mention midnight Thanksgiving openings or even before dawn. The 1995 story, published the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 24, noted that the big-box stores of the time — all three long since closed all around — opened their doors at 7 a.m. and the parking lots weren’t necesssarily filled. What a far cry from a decade or two later, when stores would open Thanksgiving night.

A few years later, when I became the managing editor of a newspaper group, I continued sending reporters out on assignment on Black Friday. By then, they were stories worth doing because they weren’t just a temperature-taking of shopping habits but a measure of how local businesses were doing. Then, for another decade, I didn’t cover retailing or anything local, so Black Friday never came up.

According to my records— and a Google search I just did — the last time I used the words “Black Friday” was on Nov. 26, 2012, in a story. I haven’t needed to since: I don’t remember the last time I worked on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday where I work …