How Black Friday Got Its Name

Have you heard that the day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday” because, after months of red ink (operating at a loss), that’s the day retail sales soar? True, many retailers earn most of their revenue toward the end of the year, when holiday shopping finally puts them in the black. True, by long-standing convention, stores delayed putting up their Christmas displays until after Thanksgiving. But that supposed origin of “Black Friday” is as mythical as the folktale of how the tiger got its stripes.

The term first appeared in print to describe a stock market crash on Friday, Sept. 24, 1869. Sixty years later, the Great Depression began with the “Black Tuesday” crash of Oct. 29, 1929. In the 1950s, police in Philadelphia dreaded the day after Thanksgiving. Unruly crowds poured into the city to shop. The Army-Navy football game that Saturday, most often played in Philadelphia, made matters worse. Crime soared. Police worked twelve-hour shifts. They called the day “Black Friday,” and the name stuck.

Retailers hated the term “Black Friday,” with its connotations of financial disaster and civic chaos. They tried to rebrand the busiest shopping day of the year as “Big Friday.” It never caught on. At last, in the 1980s, retailers devised a clever ploy. They’d give the disparaging old term an exciting new origin story: the black ink of profits. It conjured up visions of financial abundance, with steep sales to pull in the crowds.

As for the introverts among us who prefer to huddle at home, we’re more than happy to leave Black Friday behind and move forward into December.

Image: Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.