Why Is It Called Black Friday and Where the Name Began

Every November the same question pops up in search bars and around dinner tables: why is it called Black Friday, and what does a shopping day have to do with the colour black? Most people have heard one tidy explanation, usually about shops finally turning a profit, and assume that settles it. The real story is messier, more local and a lot more interesting, and it starts with traffic police in Philadelphia rather than accountants.

Here is a plain answer, the history behind it, the myths worth dropping and what the name means for shoppers today.

Why is it called Black Friday? The short answer

The name Black Friday, as used for the day after American Thanksgiving, comes from Philadelphia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. City police officers used it to describe the chaos of that Friday, when crowds of suburban shoppers poured into downtown stores and football fans arrived for the Army and Navy game held the next day. Officers had to work long shifts, sometimes 12 hours, with no time off. Traffic jammed, shoplifting rose and tempers frayed. To them it was a black day, in the old sense of grim or disastrous.

The phrase spread through local newspapers and radio. Philadelphia retailers disliked it and even tried to rebrand the day as "Big Friday" around 1961. That campaign failed. By the 1980s the term had leaked out of Philadelphia and was used across the United States.

Where the profit story came from

The explanation most people know says that shops ran at a loss, or "in the red", for most of the year and moved into profit, or "in the black", on the day after Thanksgiving. It sounds neat because accountants really did record losses in red ink and profits in black ink.

The trouble is timing. This version only became popular in the 1980s, decades after the police in Philadelphia were already using the name. It appears to be a story that retailers and journalists adopted because it put a positive spin on a phrase that originally meant something unpleasant. It is also not true as a business fact. Most large retailers are profitable across the year, and few depend on a single day to move from loss into profit.

So the profit story is not the origin. It is a later reinterpretation that stuck because it is easier to explain.

Older uses of the phrase Black Friday

Long before shopping was involved, "Black Friday" was a label for a financial disaster. On Friday 24 September 1869, two speculators, Jay Gould and James Fisk, tried to corner the gold market in New York. When the US Treasury released gold to break their scheme, the price collapsed in minutes and many investors were ruined. Newspapers called it Black Friday.

The phrase was used for other grim Fridays too, including market panics in the 1800s and various disasters. In Britain, "Black Friday" also refers to 18 November 1910, when police and suffragettes clashed violently outside Parliament. Calling a day "black" to mean dark, tragic or chaotic is an old habit in English, as in Black Monday for stock market crashes.

That background is why the Philadelphia police chose the name. They were borrowing a familiar expression for a bad day, not inventing a new one. If you enjoy this kind of word history, our explainer on why Friday the 13th is considered unlucky looks at another Friday with a dark reputation.

A myth worth dropping completely

A claim circulates online every year that Black Friday got its name from a day when slaves were sold at a discount after Thanksgiving. It is shared widely on social media and sounds plausible to people who already know that the history of the United States includes slavery.

Historians and fact checkers have found no evidence for it. There is no record of the phrase being used this way, and the timeline does not fit: the shopping meaning dates to the 1950s, almost a century after slavery was abolished. The real history of slavery is documented and serious enough without an invented link to a retail term. Repeating the myth actually distracts from that real history.

The common advice is to "just share it to start a conversation". I disagree. Spreading a false origin story is not harmless, because it makes the real record easier to dismiss. Sharing the Philadelphia explanation instead is both accurate and interesting.

How Black Friday spread beyond the United States

For most of the 20th century, Black Friday was an American event tied to Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November. The Friday became an unofficial holiday for many workers, giving shops a captive audience for the start of the Christmas season.

Online shopping changed that. In the 2010s, international retailers began running Black Friday promotions in Britain, Canada, Australia, much of Europe and parts of Latin America and Asia, even in countries with no Thanksgiving holiday. In the UK, the day took off around 2013 and 2014, with crowded scenes in supermarkets that made the news. Today many shops run deals for a full week or even the whole of November, and the Monday after is called Cyber Monday, a term coined in 2005 for online sales.

Key dates at a glance

What the name means for shoppers now

Knowing why it is called Black Friday will not save you money, but it does explain a lot about the day. The original meaning was chaos, and the event still has that energy: limited stock, countdown timers and pressure to decide fast. Those tactics are designed to stop you comparing prices.

A few practical habits help. Write a list of what you actually need before the sales start. Check a product's price history over the previous three months, because some items are marked up in October and "discounted" back to normal in November. Set a firm budget. If an item is not on your list and you would not have bought it at full price, the discount is not a reason to buy it.

For more plain answers to questions people search for, browse our full collection of everyday explainers.

Frequently asked questions

Why is it called Black Friday and not another colour?

Black has long been used in English to describe grim or disastrous days, as in Black Monday or Black Tuesday. Philadelphia police chose the word in the 1950s because the Friday after Thanksgiving was chaotic and exhausting for them. The colour describes the mood, not money.

Is Black Friday named after shops making a profit?

Not originally. The idea that shops moved from red ink to black ink on that day only became popular in the 1980s, long after the name existed. It is a later explanation that retailers preferred to the original negative meaning.

When did Black Friday start in the UK?

Some retailers ran small promotions earlier, but Black Friday became a big event in Britain around 2013 and 2014. Online retailers and supermarket chains drove its growth, and it now often runs as a week of deals instead of a single day.