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The name sounds like something went wrong.
Nearly every other big shopping day got a cheerful name. Cyber Monday. Boxing Day. Singles’ Day. This one got called black — the word English keeps for crashes, plagues and disasters. And most of us repeat the same explanation for why: shops run at a loss all year, then on this one day they finally cross over into profit and go “into the black.”
It is a tidy story. It is also the newest piece of the whole thing.
Follow the name backwards through the printed record and that explanation turns up roughly thirty years after the name itself — offered by the very people who had spent two decades trying to get rid of it.
Why Is It Called Black Friday? The First Known Use Was About Absent Workers
The earliest known appearance of “Black Friday” for the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday is not in an advert. It is in a factory trade magazine.
In November 1951, Factory Management and Maintenance ran a short item headed “Friday After Thanksgiving.” It was not about crowds. It was not about bargains. It was about staff phoning in sick.
Thanksgiving in the United States always lands on a Thursday, which leaves one working day stranded between the holiday and the weekend. A lot of people in 1951 decided they were unwell that Friday, and four days off is a much better run than one. The managers who had to cover those shifts called it Black Friday. The magazine used the phrase again the following year.
Then it died. It did not catch on, and nobody selling anything picked it up.
Then the Police Took the Name
Around the same era — the record does not pin down a first date — officers in Philadelphia and in Rochester, New York began using “Black Friday,” and “Black Saturday” after it, for something else entirely. The traffic.
The Christmas shopping season opened that weekend. Downtown filled. In Philadelphia the crowds were compounded by a football fixture the city hosted on the Saturday, which pulled in tens of thousands more. And the people standing in the middle of all of it, directing cars and finding lost children, gave the days a name that matched the experience of working them.
No single person is on record as having coined it, and the sources are careful about that. It reads like what it almost certainly was: shift slang that spread because it was accurate.
Notice what the first two meanings have in common. Neither of them came from anyone making money. One came from workers avoiding the day. The other came from the people absorbing its consequences.
Philadelphia Tried Twice to Rename It, and Lost Both Times
The shop owners hated the name, which is fair enough. “Black” is not a word you want welded to your biggest weekend of the year.
A trade newsletter, Public Relations News, reported in December 1961 that Philadelphia merchants had taken the problem to a city official — Deputy City Representative Abe S. Rosen — and that the proposed fix was a straight swap of adjectives. Black Friday and Black Saturday would become Big Friday and Big Saturday.
It did not take.
Years later a reporter who had covered the city in that period, Joseph P. Barrett of the Philadelphia Bulletin, set down his own account of the fight: after the merchants complained, the police commissioner put out a press release the following year calling the day Big Friday. The reporters read it and kept writing Black Friday anyway. That second attempt comes to us as one journalist’s memory recorded long after the fact rather than a document from the time — but nobody needs convincing of how it ended. Nobody says Big Friday.
And here is the part that surprised me most. The name stayed local for an astonishingly long time. When The New York Times put it in print on 29 November 1975, it was still being explained to readers as a Philadelphia thing.
The Accounting Story Arrives in 1981
The earliest known printed version of the in-the-red-to-in-the-black explanation appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 28 November 1981. Thirty years after the factory magazine. Twenty years after the failed rename.
And it came from the merchants. The same side that had wanted the word gone. Having failed to replace the name, they replaced its meaning — black was no longer a complaint about crowds, it was bookkeeping. Ledgers genuinely were once kept with losses in red ink and profits in black, so the story had just enough real vocabulary in it to travel. Explanations usually do.
What it did not have was a firm grip on the facts. Four years later, in November 1985, an Inquirer writer named Jennifer Lin published a piece under one of the great headlines in the history of etymology: “Why the Name Black Friday? Uh … Well …” Chasing the origin, she found that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles had never heard of the term at all.
Sit with that for a second. In 1985 the explanation we now all recite as settled fact was already in print — and the name it claimed to explain had not yet arrived in two of the largest retail cities in the country.
The accounting claim is also shakier than it sounds. Most large retail chains are not really losing money for eleven months and getting rescued in the twelfth; they tend to post profits through the year, with the holiday quarter carrying an outsized share of the total. The season matters enormously. It is just not the hinge the story makes it.
Most of this dating exists because of archival digging by the researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake, written up by the linguist Ben Zimmer in a 2011 piece on the name’s origins. It is worth saying plainly that some of this record is still open. “Earliest known” means earliest anyone has found, not earliest that exists.
What the Name Has Always Been Honest About
So here is the whole chain, in order. Absent workers. Then overwhelmed police. Then merchants rebranding a word they could not delete.
Every version of the name came from someone absorbing the day rather than profiting from it.
And there is one more piece of the arrangement that nobody designed on purpose. The biggest buying day of the year sits less than twenty-four hours after a holiday whose entire job is to sit still and count what you already have. Gratitude on the Thursday. Queue in the dark on the Friday. One day for enough, the next one for more.
Very old wisdom noticed that gap long before there were shops to blame it on — that whoever loves money never quite arrives at having enough of it, because the wanting grows at the same rate as the having. Not a warning about money. An observation about appetite. Something in us keeps moving the finish line, and no amount of acquiring ever catches up to it.
Which means this was never really a shopping problem. The research has its own names for the same thing: the hedonic treadmill, where everything new quietly fades back to normal, and the Diderot effect, where one new thing makes everything near it look shabby. The oldest version of the observation and the newest one agree with each other almost word for word.
So What Do You Do With a Good Deal?
Buy it, quite possibly. A discount on something you were already going to buy is simply a discount, and there is nothing noble about paying more than you have to. If the sale gets a winter coat onto a child who needs one, the sale did something good.
What the history gives you is smaller than a lesson and more useful than one. It is a single question you can hold while you scroll.
Was I looking for this on Wednesday?
That is the whole test. Not whether the price is good — the price probably is good. Whether the wanting was already yours before the day handed it to you. If you are curious how your own instincts run, our free What Is My Money Personality? quiz takes about five minutes and is surprisingly direct about why you buy the way you do.
As for the name: it was never an accusation aimed at the shopper. It came from people who were tired. Out of everything attached to that Friday, the name is the one part that has been telling the truth the whole time.
A good place to start: The Beginner’s Guide to Feeling God’s Presence Every Day. A short video guide and a companion PDF for anyone who wants to notice God in ordinary days — the commute, the kitchen, the queue — rather than only in quiet ones. Get the free guide. Free.
One Question Worth Arguing About
Now that you know the accounting explanation was invented decades after the name, does it actually matter? One view says a word belongs to whoever uses it — if a few hundred million people mean “the day the sales start,” then that is simply what it means now, and the 1951 factory item is a curiosity. The other view says the first meaning is the true one and everything after it is marketing. Which side are you on? Leave a comment and make your case.
Share This
- “Black Friday” was first recorded in 1951 — for factory workers calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving. The “stores finally go into the black” story showed up thirty years later, from merchants who hated the name. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/why-is-it-called-black-friday/
- Philadelphia tried twice to rename Black Friday to “Big Friday.” The police commissioner even put out a press release. The reporters ignored him. Every version of the name came from people who had to absorb the day, not sell on it: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/why-is-it-called-black-friday/
- In 1985 a reporter went looking for the origin of “Black Friday” and found that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles had never heard the phrase — four years after the famous “in the black” explanation was already in print. Great read: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/why-is-it-called-black-friday/
Questions People Ask About the Name
Why is it called Black Friday?
The earliest known use of “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving appeared in November 1951, in the American trade magazine Factory Management and Maintenance, where it named the day factory workers called in sick to stretch the holiday into a four-day weekend. Police in Philadelphia and in Rochester, New York then used “Black Friday” and “Black Saturday” for the crowds and traffic that came with the opening of the Christmas shopping season. The familiar explanation — that shops cross from being “in the red” to “in the black” — only appears in print in 1981, offered by merchants who disliked the name they already had.
Did Black Friday get its name because stores finally turn a profit that day?
Not originally. The earliest known printed version of that explanation is a Philadelphia Inquirer article from 28 November 1981, about thirty years after the name’s first recorded use, and it was put forward by merchants who objected to the term. The idea borrows real vocabulary from old bookkeeping, where losses were written in red ink and profits in black. But most large retail chains do not actually run at a loss for eleven months of the year and get saved in the twelfth; the holiday quarter carries an unusually large share of annual profit rather than creating all of it.
Is it true that Black Friday is named after a day slaves were sold?
No evidence supports that claim, and fact-checking organisations including Snopes and Africa Check have examined and rejected it. The documented earliest uses of “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving date from the 1950s, more than eighty years after slavery was abolished in the United States, and the paper trail runs through a factory trade magazine and Philadelphia police slang. A photograph often circulated alongside the claim has also been shown to be unrelated to it.
When is Black Friday 2026?
Friday 27 November 2026. In the United States, Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November, which is 26 November in 2026, and Black Friday is the day immediately after it. Many retailers outside the United States now run Black Friday sales on the same date even in countries that do not mark Thanksgiving at all.
Did anyone ever try to change the name Black Friday?
Yes, in Philadelphia, at least twice. A trade newsletter reported in December 1961 that merchants had taken their complaint to a city official, Deputy City Representative Abe S. Rosen, who suggested renaming the days “Big Friday” and “Big Saturday.” A reporter who covered the city at the time later recalled that the police commissioner also issued a press release promoting “Big Friday” the next year. Journalists ignored both attempts and carried on using Black Friday, which is why nobody has heard of Big Friday.
