When you think about it, many American holidays are connected to - some might say corrupted by - retail.

New Year's Day heralds January white sales; Presidents Day drives car deals; virtually every mall store in the land runs special promotions on Easter, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Columbus Day.

But no single day in America is devoted more exclusively to shopping than the post-Thanksgiving annual orgy of consumerism known as Black Friday, when more than 150 million Americans are expected to stampede into retail outlets like so many wildebeests.

That is, unless they heed remonstrations from an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that posted a message on a stopblackfriday.com website urging a boycott of major retailers "to send an economic message to big business and banks that profits over consumers is not good business." An online petition with more than 184,000 virtual signatures vainly attempted to persuade Target to let their employees spend Thanksgiving with their families instead of at work.

The bull's-eye department store was joined by Walmart, Toys 'R' Us, Sears and a number of other chain stores, including those at the Crystal Mall in Waterford, that opened at various times on Thursday.

We sympathize, especially this year, with the plight of merchants who rely so heavily on holiday sales. With unemployment stagnating at more than 9 percent, U.S. economic expansion likewise stalled, and the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index sinking to the second-lowest level in 26 years of data, retailers are more desperate than ever to bring in customers.

But their efforts may prove to be a double-edged sword, because some analysts warn that Internet-savvy consumers will snap up only steeply discounted merchandise and turn their noses up at goods sold at regular prices. Thus, stores may wind up with higher sales but lower profits.

The term Black Friday, incidentally, can be traced back more than four decades, depending on which account you believe - but the concept of waiting to start Christmas shopping until after Thanksgiving goes back much further.

In fact, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was so eager to give merchants in the post-Depression era a boost that in 1939 he decreed that Thanksgiving would be celebrated a week early on the third Thursday of November, and for two years the holiday was known as "Franksgiving."

After considerable protests, Congress passed a bill returning the holiday to the fourth Thursday.

Now that Black Friday ends tonight, we can prepare for the next "holiday" in two days: Cyber Monday, when online shoppers have their field day.