Here's what it's really like to work retail on Black Friday

"Black Friday" is no term of endearment, especially for the people who have to work in retail that day.

From retailers' perspectives, being "in the black" is a good thing - it means profits. For many of them, Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year.

But the name has darker origins. As Time reports, newspapers in the 1960s reappropriated the term Black Friday, which was originally used to describe the September 24, 1864 stock market crash and ensuing panic it caused, to describe the rush of crowds stores saw the day after Thanksgiving.

These days, to call it the most hectic day in retail is an understatement.

To get a better sense for what it's really like to work retail on Black Friday, we asked a former Best Buy sales associate, who handled customer service and worked as a cashier during five Black Fridays until 2013, to weigh in. Here's what she had to say about her experience: