Black Friday, 28 November 2013, Laramie, Wyoming
21 November 2023
In the United States, the Friday after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday. The day is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season and is the busiest shopping day of the year, with many stores offering sales and discounts. And Black Friday sales have spread beyond the borders of the United States. When I lived in Toronto, there were Black Friday sales on the day after American Thanksgiving, despite it not being a holiday in Canada. (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October.)
Use of Black Friday to refer to the day following Thanksgiving got its start in the 1950s in the Philadelphia police department, whose traffic division referred to the day as such because of its unusually high volume of traffic. In addition to it being a heavy shopping day, the annual Army-Navy football game was held on next day—the city being neutral ground, roughly equidistant between West Point and Annapolis—and out-of-town crowds would stream into the city on that Friday.
The first use of the term in print that anyone has found is in Women’s Wear Daily of 28 November 1960. In an article describing sales forecasts for that Christmas season, the paper had this to say about Philadelphia:
All sources were bitter about newspaper and, particularly, repeated radio news bulletins reiterating Mayor Dilworth’s plea for people to leave their cars at home and take public transportation, and reports from police officials forecasting record traffic jams, both vehicular and pedestrian, for “black Friday.”
And there is this from the newsletter Public Relations News of 18 December of the following year:
Santa has brought Philadelphia stores a present in the form of “one of the biggest shopping weekends in recent history.” At the same time, it has again been proven that there is a direct relationship between sales and public relations.
For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country's most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday. The media cooperated in spreading the news of the beauty of Christmas-decorated downtown Philadelphia, the popularity of a “family-day outing” to the department stores during the Thanksgiving weekend, the increased parking facilities, and the use of additional police officers for guaranteeing a free flow of traffic ... Rosen reports that business over the weekend was so good that merchants are giving downtown Philadelphia "a starry-eyed new look."
In November 1994, long-time Philadelphia newspaperman Joseph Barrett wrote of his recollections about the origin of the term for the Philadelphia Daily News:
The term “Black Friday” came out of the old Philadelphia Police Department’s traffic squad. The cops used it to describe the worst traffic jams which annually occurred in Center City on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
It was the day that Santa Claus took his chair in the department stores and every kid in the city wanted to see him. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season.
Schools were closed. Late in the day, out-of-town visitors began arriving for the Army-Navy football game.
Every “Black Friday,” no traffic policeman was permitted to take the day off. The division was place on 12 hours of duty, and even the police band was ordered to Center City. It was not unusual to see a trombone player directing traffic.
[…]
In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulleting.
In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions.
Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. […]
The following year, Brown put out a press release describing the day as “Big Friday.” But Kleger and I held our ground, and once more said it was “Black Friday.” And of course we used it year after year. Then television picked it up.
Unfortunately, his old paper, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, has not been digitized, so I can’t search for what he wrote at the time.
It is often said that the day is so called because it is the date when retailers’ annual sales figures become profitable, that is move from the red into the black. But this is a post hoc rationalization dating to the 1980s and is not the original metaphor underlying the phrase.
There is an earlier, apparently one-off, use of Black Friday to refer to the day after Thanksgiving, but this is a reference to worker absenteeism on that day, not shopping. Since Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, workers would typically take the next day off to create a long weekend. Nowadays, of course, most non-retail businesses simply close on that Friday. Editor M. J. Murphy wrote the following in the November 1951 issue of Factory Management & Maintenance:
WHAT TO DO ABOUT “FRIDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING”
“Friday-after-Thanksgiving-it is” is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that's the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the “Black Friday” comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick—and can prove it.
What to do? Many companies have tried the standard device of denying Thanksgiving Day pay to employees absent the day before and after the holiday. Trouble is, you can't deny pay to those legitimately ill. But what's legitimate? Tough to decide these days of often miraculously easy doctors' certificates.
Glenn L. Martin, Baltimore aircraft manufacturer has another solution: When you decide you want to sweeten up the holiday kitty, pick Black Friday to add to the list. That's just what Martin has done. Friday after Thanksgiving is the company's seventh paid holiday.
We’re not suggesting more paid holidays just to get out of a hole. But, if you can make a good trade in bargaining, there are lots of worse things than having a holiday on a day that was half holiday anyhow. Shouldn’t cost too much for that reason, either.
The next February Murphy used Black Friday again in the same context:
MORE ABOUT “FRIDAY-AFTER-THANKSGIVING”
November FACTORY (page 137) told of one company’s solution to heavy Friday-after-Thanksgiving absenteeism. The company added “Black Friday” to its list of paid holidays.
Murphy appears to have been the only one to use Black Friday in the context of worker absenteeism, but he is hardly the first to give that label to a day. The day after Thanksgiving is not the only Black Friday in history. Friday the thirteenth, regardless of when it happens, is often referred to as black Friday. Specific dates that have been christened black Friday include: 6 December 1745, the day when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arrival in Britain was announced in London; 11 May 1866, a day of a stock market panic in London; and 24 September 1869, a day of a financial panic on Wall Street over falling gold prices.
The use of black + day-of-the-week to designate a date on which something bad happened is even older, dating to at least 1576 when Black Saturday was used to denote 10 December 1547, when the Scottish army was defeated by the English at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh during the conflict known as the Rough Wooing.
Perhaps the most famous of the black days is Black Thursday of 24 October 1929, the date of the Wall Street stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. That name appeared by the next day. From an Associated Press report of 25 October 1929:
Berlin financial circles yesterday decided that “black Thursday” on the New York Stock exchange had brought forth a sigh of relief throughout Europe, which suffered from the exaggerated speculation that had been going on in Wall Street.
Back to the topic of post-Thanksgiving shopping, the Monday after the holiday has been christened Cyber Monday. This term first appears in 2005, at a time when high-speed home internet connections were rare, and most people connected to the web via work computers. The Monday following Thanksgiving, when office workers returned to work, thus became a heavy online shopping day. Cyber Monday first appears in print in the New York Times on 19 November 2005 (although the reporter plumps for the myth about the Black Friday’s origin):
CYBER MONDAY Because the world needs another Officially Named shopping day, the people who dreamed up Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving, when retailers hope to turn a profit) have created a nickname for the following Monday.
Hence the catchy Cyber Monday, so called because millions of productive Americans, fresh off a weekend at the mall, are expected to return to work and their high-speed Internet connections on Nov. 28 and spend the day buying what they liked in all those stores.
Though it sounds like slick marketing, Cyber Monday, it turns out, is a legitimate trend. According to Shop.org, a trade group, 77 percent of online retailers reported a substantial sales increase on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year. “Not good for employers,” observed Ed Bussey, senior vice president for marketing at the online lingerie retailer Figeaves.com.
Cyber Monday continues to be used in marketing copy, advertising post-Thanksgiving online sales, even though the original rationale for why that Monday would be an especially heavy online shopping day no longer applies. And both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have burst their original temporal confines and are now applied as labels for sales that occur anytime within close proximity, before or after, Thanksgiving.
Sources:
Associated Press. “Berlin See Benefit to Europe in Break.” Seattle Daily Times, 25 October 1929, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Barbero, Michael. “Ready, Aim, Shop: Five Trends to Watch This Holiday Shopping Season.” New York Times, 19 November 2005, C4/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Barrett, Joseph P. “This Friday Was Black with Traffic.” Philadelphia Daily News, 25 November 1994, 80. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Fairchild News Service. “Initial Christmas Sales Run Even to Slightly Ahead.” Women’s Wear Daily, 28 November 1960, 4/5. ProQuest.
Murphy, M. J. “Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives.” Factory Management and Maintenance, 109.11, November 1951, 137.
———. “Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives.” Factory Management and Maintenance, 110.2, February 1952, 133.
Oxford English Dictionary Online. Third Edition. September 2011. s. v. Black Friday, n., black, adj. & n., Black Saturday, n., Black Thursday, n.
Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “‘Black Friday’ (day after Thanksgiving), 1951.” American Dialect Society Email List (ADS-L). 5 August 2009.
———. “‘Black Friday’ (day after Thanksgiving), 1961.” American Dialect Society Email List (ADS-L). 5 May 2011.
Zimmer, Ben. “The Origins of ‘Black Friday.’” Word Routes. 25 November 2011.
Photo credit: Powhusku, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.