Why Is It Called Black Friday? How Day After Thanksgiving Got Name

Each year, people across the nation eagerly await for the arrival of Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving offers consumers the opportunity to score great deals and bargain discounts on a variety of items, some of which they wouldn’t be able to afford any other day of the year.

Although this day is widely praised by customers looking to save money ahead of Christmas, Black Friday wasn’t always celebrated for the financial perks that benefit both consumers and retailers.

Prior to the invention of Black Friday, terms like Black Monday and Black Wednesday were synonymous with devastating events like stock market crashes and air traffic issues.

According to The New York Times, the Executive producer of Vocabulary.com, Ben Zimmer, traced the origins to Black Friday’s association with shopping to 1960s Philadelphia, where authorities openly considered the day after Thanksgiving as the most inconvenient time of the year.

Local police dreaded the arrival of Black Friday, in which they were forced to deal with bad traffic and other negatives associated with the crowds of shoppers who traveled to a variety of stores in order to purchase excessive items.

Unfortunately, this was not well received by retailers who wanted to create a positive affiliation between their establishments and the day after Thanksgiving. They initially attempted to change the shopping holiday to Big Friday, but it never caught on. Eventually, business owners managed to get rid of negative perceptions by turning Black Friday into the one time of year when the books go from red to black.

Since then, the reinvention of Black Friday has been so successful, retailers have expanded the popular shopping holiday across multiple days of the week. As a result, consumers now have an entire shopping season to look forward to each year, as opposed to only one day dedicated to awesome deals.