Why Is It Called Black Friday?

The Earliest Documented Use (1951)

The earliest known appearance of "Black Friday" for the day after Thanksgiving is in the trade journal Factory Management and Maintenance, in November 1951, and again in 1952. At that point the phrase had nothing to do with shopping crowds. It described a workplace problem: factory employees calling in sick on the Friday after Thanksgiving so they could stretch the holiday into a four-day weekend, which left plant managers scrambling to cover shifts.

The Philadelphia and Rochester Police Term

Around the same period, police departments in Philadelphia and Rochester independently started using "Black Friday" for a different reason: the heavy traffic congestion and packed sidewalks that showed up every year as the Christmas shopping season kicked off the day after Thanksgiving. For officers who had to manage that congestion, it was a tired, half-complaining nickname for a rough day on the job, not a celebration of shopping.

Local merchants weren't fans of the negative-sounding name. In 1961, Philadelphia retailers tried to rebrand the day as "Big Friday" instead, hoping a more upbeat name would stick. It didn't catch on, and "Black Friday" continued to circulate, largely as Philadelphia-area slang, appearing in The New York Times by November 29, 1975.

The Red Ink, Black Ink Story Came Later

The friendlier explanation many people know today, that stores traditionally recorded losses in red ink and profits in black ink, and that this was the day many retailers' yearly books swung into the black, is a real accounting practice, but it isn't the original coinage. The earliest published reference tying that explanation specifically to the shopping-day name appears in The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 28, 1981, roughly three decades after the phrase first showed up in print. By the early 1980s, merchants were actively promoting this version because it gave the already-popular name a much more flattering story than an early-1950s workplace complaint or a 1970s police term.

A Much Older, Unrelated "Black Friday"

The phrase itself predates the shopping holiday by decades. In 1869, financial speculators Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the US gold market, and when the scheme collapsed, gold prices plummeted roughly 18% in a single day, September 24, 1869, a date that was nicknamed "Black Friday" at the time. That financial panic has no connection to Thanksgiving weekend shopping. It's simply an earlier, separate event that happened to get the same nickname, decades before the retail meaning existed.

From One Day to a Whole Weekend

The shopping period built around Black Friday has kept expanding since the 1980s. Cyber Monday, the online-shopping-focused Monday after Black Friday weekend, was named in 2005 by the National Retail Federation's Shop.org division, after retailers noticed a jump in online sales that Monday in 2003 and 2004 as people got back to faster office internet connections after the holiday weekend. Small Business Saturday, promoting local and independent retailers on the Saturday of the same weekend, was created in 2010 by American Express, in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the city of Boston, and was first observed on November 27, 2010.

Between an earlier and earlier opening bell at big-box retailers and these two newer add-on shopping days, "Black Friday" today is often used loosely to describe the entire multi-day stretch from Thanksgiving evening through the following Monday, even though the calendar holiday it's named after is still, technically, just the one Friday.

So Which Explanation Is the Real Origin?

Based on the documented print history, the phrase started as a 1951 workplace complaint about post-Thanksgiving absenteeism, was picked up soon after by Philadelphia and Rochester police as a term for holiday-shopping traffic, and only picked up the flattering red-ink/black-ink accounting story roughly three decades later, once retailers wanted a more marketable explanation for a name they'd stopped trying to fight. The accounting story is the one most commonly repeated today, but it's the newest of the explanations, not the original one.

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