Black Friday's Real Origin: Philadelphia Traffic Jams, Not Black Ink

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The popular story says Black Friday is the day retailers finally move from red ink to black. This episode shows that tale was invented in the early 1980s. The name actually came from police in Philadelphia and Rochester in the 1950s and 60s, who used it for the gridlock, smog, and crowds that hit downtown after Thanksgiving, made worse by the Army-Navy football game. Before that, the phrase marked disasters like the Panic of 1869, when Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to corner the gold market and prices fell 18 percent in a day.

From there the story follows the holiday's constant reinvention. Merchants failed to rebrand it as Big Friday in 1961, so they rewrote its meaning instead. Store hours crept from 6 a.m. to midnight to Thanksgiving evening, until a sales drop and worker walkouts exposed the limits. The idea then crossed borders, changing its name and rules in Mexico, Pakistan, and the Middle East, sparking chaos in British supermarkets, and earning mockery in Brazil, before moving almost entirely onto phones.

• In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier under pressure from retailers who wanted a longer Christmas shopping season. Critics called it Franksgiving.
• The 2014 push to open on Thanksgiving Day backfired: overall sales for the holiday weekend fell 11 percent from the year before.
• Mexico created El Buen Fin in 2011, tied to the Mexican Revolution holiday, with credit terms that sometimes ran 18 months interest free.
• Brazilian shoppers nicknamed the event Black Fraud after retailers raised prices in advance, joking that everything was on sale for half of the double.
• The National Retail Federation coined Cyber Monday in 2005 after noticing people shopped from fast office connections. In 2020, online Black Friday sales rose 22 percent to about 9 billion dollars as store traffic fell by roughly half.