It is called “Black Friday” because the day after Thanksgiving used to create such heavy traffic, crowds, and chaos in Philadelphia that police and locals described it as a dark, difficult day.

Quick Scoop

The original meaning

  • In the 1950s–1960s, Philadelphia police started calling the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” because streets and stores were jammed with shoppers and visitors in town for the Army–Navy football game.
  • For police and workers, it meant long shifts, traffic jams, accidents, and even shoplifting spikes, so “black” referred to the negative impact of the crowds.

How the story changed

  • Retailers disliked the gloomy tone and tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday,” but that never really caught on.
  • By the 1980s, a new explanation became popular: that Black Friday is when stores go from being “in the red” (losing money) to “in the black” (making profit), giving the name a more positive financial spin.

Modern Black Friday

  • Today, Black Friday is known as the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, and it is often one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the United States.
  • The term has spread worldwide and now covers both in‑store “doorbuster” sales and huge online promotions, often stretching into “Cyber Monday” and week‑long or even month‑long deals.

TL;DR: The name started as a negative nickname from overworked Philadelphia police dealing with post‑Thanksgiving chaos, and later got rebranded into a feel‑good story about retailers moving “into the black.”

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