No single person or company “made” Black Friday; it evolved over time from different events and practices in U.S. history.

Early uses of “Black Friday”

  • The phrase “Black Friday” first appeared in 1869 to describe a financial panic caused by Wall Street speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk trying to corner the gold market, which led to a market crash and economic chaos.
  • This early “Black Friday” had nothing to do with shopping or holidays; it was about a financial scandal and the damage it did to the economy.

Philadelphia police and the shopping meaning

  • The link between “Black Friday” and the day after U.S. Thanksgiving began in Philadelphia in the 1950s, when police used the term to complain about the traffic jams and unruly crowds who came for early holiday shopping and the Army–Navy football game.
  • Local police and city officials did not “invent” the shopping day but did popularize the name “Black Friday” to describe how miserable the crowds and congestion made that workday for them.

How retailers turned it into a sales event

  • Retailers later embraced the term and spun a friendlier story: that this was the day when stores went from being “in the red” (losing money) to “in the black” (making a profit) on their accounting ledgers.
  • Through the 1970s and 1980s, big chains expanded post‑Thanksgiving discounts and marketing, gradually turning Black Friday into a nationwide shopping “holiday” with doorbusters, early openings, and now online deals.

So who “made” Black Friday?

  • The name in its shopping sense came from Philadelphia police slang in the 1950s, not from a single brand or ad campaign.
  • The modern Black Friday shopping phenomenon was “made” collectively by large retailers, marketers, and consumers over several decades, as businesses competed on discounts and shoppers responded to the hype.

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