why is black friday called that

Black Friday is called “Black Friday” because Philadelphia police in the 1950s–60s used the term to describe the heavy traffic, packed streets, and chaos in the city the day after Thanksgiving.

Quick Scoop

• In mid‑20th‑century Philadelphia, the day after Thanksgiving brought huge crowds for shopping and the Army–Navy football game, creating gridlock, long police shifts, and frequent accidents; officers started calling it Black Friday to describe the bad conditions.

• Local merchants disliked the gloomy name and briefly tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday,” but the darker label stuck and spread.

• In the 1980s, retailers popularized a more upbeat explanation: that this was the day their books went from “in the red” (losses) to “in the black ” (profits), which helped turn the term into a positive, sales‑driven marketing story.

Modern Meaning

• Today, Black Friday is widely seen as the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season in the U.S., marked by deep discounts and very high store and online traffic.

• The original “bad traffic and chaos” idea has mostly faded in public memory, but the name remains as a blend of that history plus the later “in the black” profit myth.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.