Black Friday has grown into a major shopping holiday, infamous for its flashy advertising, deep discounts, and sale-driven mall brawls. But how did the high-selling sale get its name?
The name comes from the rush of shoppers the day after Thanksgiving, a welcome boom in sales for retailers that goes from operating at a loss or “in the red” to “in the black” and turning a profit. You may have heard that it refers to Stores jump on annual discounts.
But that story, at least in part, is a myth that masks a rather dark episode in the history of holiday shopping. Encyclopedia Britannica And historians.
In the 1960s, Philadelphia police officers used the phrase to describe the chaos that occurred the day after Thanksgiving. Shoppers and tourists from nearby suburbs flocked to the city ahead of Saturday's annual Army-Navy football game.
City police officers were unable to ask for time off and were forced to work extremely long hours to deal with the endless stream of visitors.
Some people took advantage of the holiday rush to pocket goods from stores, making it a notorious day of shoplifting and a major headache for police officers.
The police term “Black Friday” spread like wildfire across the city, and Philadelphia retailers quickly moved to quell it, promoting the shopping spree as “Big Friday,” but it stuck. I didn't.
By the late 1980s, retailers had successfully rebranded the shoplifting nightmare and promoted it as a big sale using a “red to black” profit statement.
Since then, the term has stuck and Black Friday has grown into a major shopping holiday. Other major sale days also appeared along the way, including Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday.
Major retailers like Amazon and Target have created their own e-commerce and in-store discount weeks in October, aiming for the last big sales before Thanksgiving weekend.
