Why is it called Black Friday?

Black Friday has become as real of a holiday as the one that precedes it. The celebrated day after Thanksgiving when every retailer in America decides collectively to offer their biggest discounts of the year. Consumers far and wide line up around the block and ultimately “storm” through stores across the country searching for deals that would otherwise be unavailable. As a new brand, we will be participating in this tradition for the first time, all while questioning why and how it came to be. Here are the seven most interesting things we learned about Black Friday.

1. Why is it called “Black Friday”?

The phrase Black Friday has popped up many times throughout history. The earliest known use of the term Black Friday refers to when, in the 1950s, workers would call in sick the day after Thanksgiving to enjoy a four day weekend. The phrase resurfaced in Philadelphia in the 1960s when police in the city used it to describe the large influx of pedestrian and vehicular traffic that would occur the day after Thanksgiving. However, it wasn’t widely used to describe the famed holiday shopping day until the 1980s. The day after Thanksgiving is typically the point in the year in which retailers stopped posting losses and started posting profits due to it being an abnormally large shopping day (more on that below). In other words, retailers would go from being “in the red” to being “in the black.” Thus we have Black Friday.

2. Why is it the Thursday after Thanksgiving?