Ask almost anyone why the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday and you will hear the same confident answer: it is the day stores finally stop losing money and start making it, moving from being «in the red» to being «in the black.» It is a neat story. It explains the name, it flatters shoppers, and it makes the whole day sound like a celebration. There is only one problem with it: it is not true, or at least, it is not where the name came from.
The real story is messier, funnier, and much more interesting. It involves a 19th-century gold-market crash, exhausted Philadelphia police officers, a failed attempt to rename the day «Big Friday,» a president moving Thanksgiving itself, and a shopping season that has slowly stretched from a single Friday into most of November. This is how Black Friday actually got its name, and how it became the season it is today.
The First Black Friday Had Nothing to Do With Shopping
Long before anyone queued outside a store, «Black Friday» was a name for disaster. The most famous early example came on September 24, 1869, when financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the American gold market. When their scheme collapsed, gold prices crashed, fortunes were wiped out, and newspapers called it Black Friday. The phrase had already been used for other financial panics, and it would go on being used that way for decades: in the language of the time, a «black» day was a bad day.
That matters because it explains why the shopping version of the name started out as a complaint, not a slogan. When Philadelphia police began calling the day after Thanksgiving «Black Friday» in the 1950s and early 1960s, they were not celebrating it. They were dreading it.
Philadelphia Police, Football Fans, and a Very Long Day
Every year, the Saturday after Thanksgiving brought the Army-Navy college football game to Philadelphia, and with it came tens of thousands of visitors. Suburban shoppers poured into the city on Friday to get a head start on Christmas shopping, the streets filled with cars and pedestrians, and the police worked long, exhausting shifts dealing with traffic jams, accidents, crowds, and shoplifting. To the officers on duty, it was the worst shift of the year, and «Black Friday» was their name for it.
The term spread from the police to other city workers and then into print. A trade publication, Public Relations News, used it in its shopping sense as early as December 18, 1961, and by January 1966 a Philadelphia stamp dealer writing in The American Philatelist noted that the police name was «not a term of endearment» to the officers themselves. In other words, the people who invented the shopping world’s Black Friday did not like the day at all.
Philadelphia’s merchants did not like the name either. It sounded gloomy, and nobody wants to advertise a day associated with traffic and trouble. According to a former Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reporter, Joseph P. Barrett, the city’s police commissioner pushed an alternative, «Big Friday,» in a press release. It never caught on. The grumble of tired police officers proved stickier than a chamber of commerce rebrand.
Where the «In the Black» Story Really Comes From
So where did the red-to-black profit story come from? It came later, as a deliberate rebrand. By the late 1980s, retailers had embraced the name and wanted a version of it that sounded positive. The idea that stores operated at a loss, in red ink, for most of the year and finally turned a profit, in black ink, on the day after Thanksgiving gave the name a cheerful explanation that shoppers could repeat. It spread widely and stuck.
It is not entirely baseless as a description of retail economics — the holiday season is genuinely important to many retailers — but as history, it is backwards. The name did not come from accountants. It came from traffic cops, and the profit story was fitted to the name decades later, once the day had become too big to rename. Knowing that does not make Black Friday any less real, but it does make the neat version of the story a lot less neat.
The Myth That Is Simply False
One more story about Black Friday deserves to be retired, because it is not just wrong but harmful. A viral claim says the name comes from a day when enslaved people were sold at a discount after Thanksgiving. Fact-checkers, including PolitiFact in 2021, have rated this false: there is no evidence for it, the dates do not line up, and the photograph shared with the claim was not even taken in America. The real paper trail runs through the 1869 gold crash and 1960s Philadelphia traffic, not through slavery. It is a reminder that a story can feel true and spread fast while having nothing behind it, and that the documented version, unglamorous as it is, is the one worth repeating.
There is a smaller footnote from the same era that is genuinely true, if less dramatic: in 1951, a factory management magazine used «Black Friday» for the day after Thanksgiving because so many workers called in sick to stretch the holiday into a four-day weekend. Offices eventually gave in and gave employees the day off, which is one more reason the Friday after Thanksgiving became a shopping day in the first place. People had the day free, and they used it.
How Thanksgiving’s Date Shaped Black Friday
Black Friday only exists because Thanksgiving has a fixed place in the calendar, and that place was itself once moved for shopping reasons. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier, to the third Thursday in November, to give Depression-era stores a longer Christmas shopping season. The change caused a national argument — some states refused to follow it — and in 1941 Congress settled the matter by fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. That law is why Black Friday falls anywhere from November 23 to November 29, depending on the year.
It is a neat piece of symmetry: a president once moved a holiday to help retailers, and decades later retailers would move their sales earlier and earlier around that same holiday. The shopping season has always pulled at the calendar; it is just pulling harder now.
From One Day to a Whole Season
For most of its life, Black Friday was a single day, and a very physical one: crowds at doors, lines before dawn, and a race for a limited number of discounted televisions and toys. Two inventions stretched it. In November 2005, the National Retail Federation’s online arm, Shop.org, coined «Cyber Monday» for the Monday after Thanksgiving, when people shopped online, often from faster office internet connections after the long weekend. Then in 2010, during the recession, American Express created «Small Business Saturday,» the Saturday after Thanksgiving, as a push to shop at local and independent businesses. The single day had become a five-day weekend.
After that, the season kept stretching in both directions. Retailers began advertising «early Black Friday» events weeks ahead of the day itself, and by the mid-2020s major retailers were announcing their plans in late October and early November, with sales running for days or weeks rather than a single morning. Online shopping changed the character of the day as well: the doorbuster queue has not disappeared, but for many shoppers Black Friday is now a week of scrolling, comparing prices, and waiting for a better deal, rather than a single frantic morning.
That is a real loss in one sense — the old Black Friday was a shared, slightly absurd American ritual — and a real gain in another. Nobody has to stand outside a store at 4 a.m. to get a fair price anymore, and the pressure to buy everything on one day has eased. What remains is the core idea: the Friday after Thanksgiving marks the start of the holiday shopping season, even if the season now starts before it.
Black Friday 2026, and How to Shop It Calmly
In 2026, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26, so Black Friday is Friday, November 27. Small Business Saturday follows on November 28, and Cyber Monday on November 30. If you plan to shop, the calmest version of the season is also the oldest advice, updated: make a list before the sales start, set a spending limit that survives the excitement, compare a «deal» against its usual price rather than its crossed-out one, and remember that the best bargains are often the ones you planned to buy anyway. Shop local on Saturday if you can; the independent stores in your town will remember it longer than a big-box website will.
And when someone tells you the name comes from stores going «into the black,» you can smile and tell them the better story: that it started as a grumble from Philadelphia police officers stuck in Thanksgiving-weekend traffic, survived a failed rebrand as «Big Friday,» and grew into a season that now stretches across November. The name was never a celebration. It became one anyway, which is perhaps the most American part of the story.
For more American traditions explained, see our history of the Thanksgiving dinner, our guide to American traditions that surprise visitors, and why Americans love Halloween and its traditions.
