Shopping Reminder Day

What the day is

Shopping Reminder Day is observed on November 26. It exists to point out that the December holidays are about four weeks away, which is the last moment that fact is still comfortable.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. It sits in the middle of the most heavily engineered stretch of the retail calendar, and the names attached to that stretch have histories of their own.

Black Friday did not come from retailers. The term was used by police in Philadelphia through the 1950s and 1960s for the day after Thanksgiving, when crowds and traffic ahead of the Army-Navy game made the city unmanageable. Local merchants disliked the association and pushed to rename it Big Friday, without success. The now-standard explanation, that it marks the point where stores move out of the red and into the black, was attached to the phrase later as a more flattering account of where it came from.

Cyber Monday is more straightforwardly commercial. A retail trade association coined it in 2005 after data showed online sales spiking when people returned to work, where connections were faster than the ones they had at home.

The underlying pressure is real enough. A large share of annual retail profit is concentrated in these weeks, which is why the discounting is aggressive and why the deadline framing is laid on so heavily.

The practical case for shopping early is not the discounts, which repeat. It is shipping capacity, which does not.

How to take part

• Write the list first. Shopping without one is how the budget goes.
• Check shipping cutoff dates now rather than in the third week of December.
• Note current prices on anything you plan to buy, so you can tell a real discount from a staged one.
• Order anything personalized or made to order immediately. That is where the genuine deadline sits.
• Set a total budget before you look at any individual price.