It is called the Black Friday sale because the term “Black Friday” has historical roots in how the day after U.S. Thanksgiving affected cities, retailers, and eventually their profits.

Quick Scoop: The Name Story

  • In the 1960s, police in Philadelphia started calling the Friday after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” because huge crowds, traffic jams, and shoplifting made the day feel dark and chaotic for them.
  • At the same time, downtown got packed with visitors coming for a big Army–Navy football game held that weekend, which worsened congestion and headaches for local authorities and workers.

From Negative To Marketing Spin

  • Local merchants did not like the gloomy sound of “Black Friday” and even tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday,” but that never really caught on.
  • By the 1980s, retailers reframed the name with a friendlier explanation: this was the point in the year when their accounts moved from being “in the red” (losses) to “in the black” (profits), thanks to heavy holiday shopping.

Why The Huge Sales?

  • The day after Thanksgiving gradually became the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S., so stores began using aggressive discounts to pull in massive crowds and kick off holiday spending.
  • Over time, this turned Black Friday into one of the busiest and most closely watched shopping days of the year, with “Black Friday sale” becoming a shorthand for deep, limited‑time discounts both in-store and online.

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