The Day After Thanksgiving: Unraveling the Phenomenon of Black Friday

In Philadelphia in the early 1960s, traffic police used a grim little nickname for the Friday after Thanksgiving: Black Friday. It had nothing to do with bargains or profit. It described the misery of working that shift, when crowds of suburban shoppers and football fans in town for the annual Army-Navy game clogged the streets, overwhelmed the pavements, and turned the officers’ day into a snarl of gridlock and shoplifting. The name was an insult, a complaint from the people who had to police the chaos. That a term coined by exasperated cops now denotes the most lucrative shopping event of the American year is one of the odder pieces of commercial history.

The name that retailers tried to bury

For years, merchants disliked “Black Friday” precisely because of its negative connotations, and in the early 1960s some Philadelphia store owners and city boosters tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday” to shake off the gloom. It did not take. The phrase was too vivid and too apt, and it spread out from Philadelphia through the 1960s and 1970s until it was national vocabulary. By the time retailers realised they could not defeat the term, they did the only sensible thing: they redefined it.

The redefinition produced one of retail’s most enduring myths. Somewhere along the way, sellers began explaining that “black” referred to the accounting convention of writing profits in black ink and losses in red, and that the day after Thanksgiving was supposedly when a shop’s ledger finally moved “into the black” for the year. It is a tidy story, and it is almost certainly a retrofit. The accounting explanation appears well after the Philadelphia police usage was already documented, and it exists to launder a word that began as a description of congestion and crime into a celebration of profitability. The false etymology is arguably a more revealing artefact than the true one, because it shows an industry actively rewriting its own origin story to suit a sales pitch.

From a single day to an economic season

Whatever the name’s roots, the commercial logic was real. The American Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November, leaving a natural gap of roughly a month before Christmas, and the Friday after it became the informal starting gun for holiday shopping. Retailers leaned into that framing with early openings, loss-leading “doorbuster” deals, and elaborate advertising built around the promise of once-a-year prices. Through the 1980s and 1990s the day inflated steadily, opening times crept from morning to dawn to midnight, and bargain hunters began queuing outside big-box stores the night before.

The escalation had a dark edge. Crowd crushes at door openings caused injuries and, in a handful of notorious cases, deaths, as shoppers surged for limited stock. The most infamous incident came in 2008, when a temporary worker at a Long Island store was trampled to death by a crowd that broke through the doors at opening. Such tragedies exposed the perverse logic of the doorbuster: deliberately limiting stock to a handful of ultra-cheap units creates exactly the scarcity that turns an orderly queue into a stampede. The competitive frenzy over a scarce discounted television is a genuinely strange piece of collective behaviour, the kind of mass psychology that also drives sudden fascinations to spread far beyond any rational basis, much as the humble smiley face travelled from a throwaway design job to a global icon. By the late 2000s the model had been exported to countries that do not celebrate Thanksgiving at all, from Britain to Brazil, purely because the sales mechanic worked regardless of the holiday it was nominally attached to.

The spread abroad produced some awkward transplants. In the United Kingdom, where Black Friday arrived in earnest around 2013 largely through American-owned retailers, the first years brought scenes of shoppers wrestling over discounted televisions that struck many British observers as faintly absurd, given that there was no Thanksgiving to justify the timing. Retailers pressed on regardless, and within a few years the day had embedded itself in the pre-Christmas calendar. The lesson was blunt: the holiday was never the point. The discount mechanic, the manufactured urgency and the calendar slot before Christmas were the transferable parts, and they travelled perfectly well without the turkey.

The digital turn

E-commerce reshaped the whole affair. In 2005, the American retail federation’s online arm coined “Cyber Monday” to describe the surge of online shopping that appeared on the first working Monday after the holiday, when people returned to fast office connections and browsed for deals. The two events soon bled into each other. Retailers pushed online discounts earlier and earlier, until the sharp one-day spike softened into a stretch of promotions running from mid-November well past the weekend. The single manic Friday became, in effect, a fortnight of overlapping sales.

This shift changed who wins and who loses. Online shopping made price comparison trivial and reduced the danger and stress of the physical stampede, but it also concentrated advantage in the hands of the largest retailers, who could afford the advertising, the logistics and the server capacity to absorb a traffic spike. It also stretched the event across time as well as channels: the crisp distinction between an in-store Friday and an online Monday dissolved into a blurred “Black Friday week” and then a “Black Friday month,” as retailers discovered that a longer window smoothed out the logistical strain and captured shoppers who would never have queued at dawn. Smaller sellers, unless they carved out a niche, found themselves competing on a field tilted steeply toward scale. The predatory dynamics of a feeding frenzy are not unique to commerce; nature offers its own version in the way an apex predator dominates its waters, a theme explored in the story of the ocean’s grey giants, the great white sharks.

The costs beneath the discounts

The savings are frequently real, particularly on large, expensive items such as televisions and appliances, where a genuine seasonal discount can meaningfully help a household’s budget. But the event’s incentives cut both ways. Time-limited “doorbuster” pricing is engineered to short-circuit deliberation, and a good deal of what is bought on Black Friday is bought precisely because it is on sale rather than because it was wanted. Some advertised discounts are calculated against inflated “original” prices that were themselves set to make the reduction look larger. Price-tracking tools and browser extensions now exist chiefly to tell shoppers whether an advertised bargain is one at all, plotting an item’s price over the preceding months so that a supposed discount can be checked against what the thing actually cost in September. That such tools are necessary at all is a quiet indictment of how much of the day’s savings are theatre.

There are human and environmental costs too. Retail and warehouse staff work punishing shifts across a weekend that used to be a holiday, and the surge in single-day shipping and disposable packaging leaves a measurable footprint in emissions and waste. A countermovement has grown up in response. “Buy Nothing Day,” launched by the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters in 1992 and later timed to coincide with Black Friday, invites people to abstain from shopping altogether for twenty-four hours. In 2015 the American outdoor retailer REI went further, closing its doors on Black Friday and paying its staff to spend the day outside under the slogan #OptOutside, a campaign it repeated for years. Whether such gestures materially change aggregate behaviour is doubtful, but their existence marks a genuine unease about what the day has become, and a recognition that a single Friday of frantic buying now carries a symbolic weight far beyond the receipts it generates.

Fun facts

• The term “Black Friday” was used by Philadelphia police in the early 1960s to describe traffic chaos, not shopping deals; the “profit ink” explanation came later as a rebrand.
• City boosters in 1960s Philadelphia tried to rename the day “Big Friday” to lose the negative associations, and the attempt failed completely.
• The crowds partly stemmed from the Army-Navy football game, traditionally played in Philadelphia the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
• “Cyber Monday” was invented in 2005 by a retail trade group’s marketers, a deliberately manufactured event rather than an organic one.
• Countries with no Thanksgiving holiday, including the United Kingdom and much of Europe, imported Black Friday purely as a sales device in the 2010s.

A closing reflection

The most instructive thing about Black Friday is not the queues or the deals but the way its meaning was rewritten in plain sight. A word invented to capture the exhaustion of overworked traffic cops was, within a generation, presented to the public as a cheerful accounting metaphor for prosperity. Almost nothing about the day is quite what the marketing says it is, including the name. Perhaps that is the real lesson to carry into the shopping season: the story a seller tells about a bargain, like the story an industry tells about its own origins, is itself a product, assembled and sold with the same care as everything else on the shelf.