Black Friday (shopping)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, and it has become the busiest shopping day of the year in the country. But the name itself once meant something far darker. Long before any retailer used it to signal the start of the Christmas shopping season, "black" was the word Americans reached for when catastrophe struck. That tradition stretches back centuries, and the story of how a word for disaster became a word for deals is stranger than most shoppers standing in line at midnight would ever guess. How did a term born from financial ruin and traffic jams get repackaged into the retail event that now moves tens of billions of dollars in a single weekend? And what happens when a shopping day outgrows the country that invented it?

• 2. A Panic in Gold

  ›

  Jay Gould and James Fisk almost broke the American economy in a single day. In 1869, the two financiers used their connections inside the Ulysses S. Grant administration to attempt to corner the gold market. When President Grant learned what was happening, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold into the market. Prices collapsed by 18% almost immediately. Fortunes were made and lost before the sun went down. The president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined in the chaos. That day was recorded in American memory as Black Friday, long before a shopping mall existed to give the phrase a different meaning. For decades, the word carried that weight: a calamity, a collapse, a day when things went badly wrong.

• 3. From Traffic Jams to Tradition

  ›

  The earliest known use of "Black Friday" to describe the day after Thanksgiving appeared in the journal Factory Management and Maintenance in November 1951. There, it referred to something far more mundane than financial panic: workers calling in sick to manufacture a four-day weekend. That usage never caught on broadly. Around the same time, police in Philadelphia and Rochester began using the same phrase to describe the massive crowds and traffic jams that accompanied the start of the Christmas shopping season. The congestion was real enough that in 1961, the city of Philadelphia worked with a public relations expert to rebrand the days as "Big Friday" and "Big Saturday." Those names were quickly forgotten. The phrase spread slowly. The New York Times first printed it on the 29th of November 1975, still referring specifically to Philadelphia. As late as 1985, a Philadelphia Inquirer report noted that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles had never heard of the term.

• 4. The Red and the Black

  ›

  Merchants in the early 1980s were unhappy. The phrase gaining national attention had a gloomy ring to it, and they were not eager to see the most important shopping day of the year associated with disaster. Their objection produced a new explanation, one that has since become the standard story: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss from January through November and only turned a profit during the holiday season. When accountants recorded these figures, red ink marked losses and black ink marked gains. Black Friday, under this telling, was the day the ledger finally turned black. The earliest known published reference to this explanation appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the 28th of November 1981. Whether the accounting story was history or invention, it worked. By the mid-1980s, the phrase was national and the cheerful interpretation had largely displaced the gloomy one.

• 5. The Calendar Behind the Shopping

  ›

  Thanksgiving's place on the calendar is not as fixed as it might seem. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a presidential proclamation moving Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday, shifting it as much as a week earlier in some years. The explicit goal was to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. Retail stores had wanted a longer runway before Christmas but none wanted to be the first to start advertising before Thanksgiving. Roosevelt's move gave them cover. Congress later reinforced the change by law, though many Americans continued celebrating on the original date for years afterward. The date of Black Friday itself fluctuates as a result: it can fall anywhere between November 23 and November 29.

• 6. Black Thursday and the Backlash

  ›

  Kmart opened its doors on Thanksgiving as early as 1991. By 2009, a Kmart manager named Freddy Moss was opening at 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving, marketing the early start as a way for shoppers to be home in time for dinner. Two years later, multiple retailers began opening at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving itself, which critics immediately dubbed "Black Thursday." The backlash was substantial. Shoppers objected to the over-commercialization of the holiday and to retail workers being kept from their families. The 2014 Thanksgiving openings were largely a failure: overall sales for the holiday weekend fell 11% compared to the prior year despite heavy store traffic on Thanksgiving night. By 2020, the pandemic had finished off the experiment. Large crowds were forbidden, major retailers had already cut hours, and online shopping on Thanksgiving set a record of $5.1 billion, 21.5% higher than 2019. Target announced in 2021 that its decision to close on Thanksgiving would be permanent.

• 7. Violence at the Doors

  ›

  In 2008, a crowd of approximately 2,000 shoppers gathered outside a Walmart in Valley Stream, New York, waiting for the 5 a.m. opening. When the doors opened, the crowd pushed forward, broke the door down, and 34-year-old employee Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death. Shoppers who were asked to stop and help refused, saying they had been waiting in the cold and were not willing to wait any longer. On the same day, two people were fatally shot during an altercation at a Toys "R" Us in Palm Desert, California. The National Retail Federation said at the time that it was not aware of any other circumstance in which a retail employee had died working on the day after Thanksgiving. The violence did not stop there. In 2011, a woman at a Los Angeles Walmart used pepper spray on fellow shoppers, injuring a reported 20 people who had been waiting in line for discounted Xbox 360 consoles. In 2016-21-year-old Demond Cottman was shot and killed outside a Macy's in New Jersey. In 2018, Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. was shot and killed by a security guard at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Alabama, after a separate shooting had wounded two people inside; police later acknowledged that Bradford was not the original shooter.

• 8. A Name That Traveled

  ›

  Since the early 21st century, retailers outside the United States have adopted Black Friday, adjusting it for local conditions in ways that reveal how charged the original name remains. In Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, the day was renamed for religious reasons: White Friday, Blessed Friday, and Yellow Friday have all been used. In France, some retailers switched to "Jour XXL" in 2016 following the Paris terror attacks of the previous November. Germany's version, promoted under the labels "Black Week" and "Black Shopping," lasts an entire week and was first launched specifically for the German market by Apple in 2006. In Turkey, the equivalent event is called Efsane Cuma, meaning "Legendary Friday." Australia carries its own complication: the phrase "Black Friday" there already referred to the devastating 1938-39 bushfires in Victoria long before any retailer tried to attach it to shopping. In Switzerland, projected Black Friday sales for 2024 were expected to reach 470 million Swiss francs. Romania holds its Black Friday two weeks before the American date. Each country's version is a local negotiation with a name that has never meant just one thing.