Why Is It Called Black Friday? The Real Origin

Transcript

The 1869 Gold Crash That Started It All

NovaWelcome to YourTalks.

NovaSo before Black Friday meant a stampede for a discounted flatscreen TV, it meant financial ruin. September 24, 1869. Two Wall Street operators — Jay Gould and James Fisk — spent months cornering the U.S. gold market, driving prices from around $130 to over $160 an ounce. Then President Grant released four million dollars of government gold to break the scheme, and the whole thing collapsed in a single day. Farmers watched their wheat and corn harvests lose half their value overnight. That catastrophe is the first thing ever called Black Friday.

AtlasTwo guys tried to rig a market, the government bailed out the system, and the day got branded as a disaster. Which is at least historically honest — nobody was spinning that into a shopping holiday. Gould and Fisk had political connections inside the Grant administration, there was a congressional investigation, and the economy took real damage. The word "black" meant exactly what it sounds like: a dark day, a ruinous day. No accounting metaphors, no doorbusters.

NovaRight, and that name sat in the culture for decades — "black days" carried that ominous weight. Black Tuesday was 1929. The pattern was consistent. So when Philadelphia police started reaching for a phrase to describe a day they absolutely dreaded, "Black Friday" was already loaded with the right energy.

Philadelphia Police, Chaos, and the Day Nobody Wanted to Work

AtlasHere is where the shopping version actually starts. The 1950s and early 1960s, Philadelphia. Every year the day after Thanksgiving, the city got crushed. Suburban shoppers flooded downtown for Christmas sales, and on Saturday there was the Army-Navy football game — a massive draw pulling even more people in. Every officer on the force got pulled to duty. The traffic was gridlocked, the sidewalks were impassable, the shoplifting spiked. Cops started calling it Black Friday, and a December 1961 issue of a trade newsletter called Public Relations News documented that it had become standard department language.

NovaAnd the name was entirely negative. Nobody in the Philadelphia Police Department was celebrating this. They were describing a day where the city broke down and they could not get out of it. So local merchants — who were benefiting from all those shoppers — absolutely hated the label. It made their busiest pre-Christmas weekend sound like a civic catastrophe.

AtlasSo the merchants tried to fix it the obvious way. They lobbied to rename it "Big Friday." Which, as a branding exercise, is one of the most anemic ideas in retail history. Nobody called it Big Friday. Nobody ever will. The name had no grip, no texture, no reason to stick. Black Friday kept going because it described how the day actually felt to anyone who had to work it.

NovaAnd that failure matters. The merchants could not kill the name, so they had to do something else with it. Which sets up exactly what happened two decades later — not a renaming, a reinterpretation.

The 'In the Black' Myth and the 1980s Retail Spin

NovaBy the 1980s, Black Friday had spread beyond Philadelphia and retailers across the country were trying to own the post-Thanksgiving shopping surge. The problem was the name still carried that grim, chaotic connotation. So instead of renaming the day, they rewrote its origin story. The new version: stores operated at a loss — in the red — for most of the year, and the Thanksgiving shopping rush finally pushed them into profit, into the black. Neat, tidy, cheerful. Also retrofitted spin, not history.

AtlasThe accounting metaphor is not wrong as a metaphor — red ink for losses, black ink for profit, that's real bookkeeping convention. But using it to explain the name Black Friday is a 1980s PR invention, not an etymology. The name came from cops dreading a catastrophic workday, and before that from a financial collapse. Retailers just decided the existing phrase needed a better story, so they wrote one.

NovaWhich is a completely predictable thing for an industry to do. You cannot get rid of a name that has that much cultural traction, so you launder it. Reframe the darkness as prosperity. It's the same instinct that made the Big Friday attempt pathetic — at least the accounting spin was clever enough to survive. By the late 1980s, it was being repeated in newspapers as though it were the origin, and most people alive today probably heard that version first.

AtlasThe speed at which a convenient myth can displace an accurate history is not a liberal problem or a conservative problem — it is a human problem. And the retailers who pushed this were not lying exactly; they were just choosing which story served their inventory clearance event. The chaotic Philadelphia origin and the 1869 gold panic got quietly buried under a story about profit margins.

From Philadelphia to the Planet: UK, Australia, and Cyber Monday

AtlasThe global spread happened in two waves. The internet came first in a slow drift — American retailers' websites had no borders, so British and Australian shoppers started encountering Black Friday deals online through the 2000s. Then Amazon UK made it formal in 2010 with its first dedicated Black Friday sale. The site reportedly crashed from demand. Three years later, Walmart-owned Asda took it physical in British stores, and the footage of shoppers brawling over discounted televisions made every news broadcast in the country. By 2014 it was a UK institution.

NovaAustralia got there around the same time, except with an added layer of irony: in Australia, "Black Friday" already meant something — the 1939 bushfires in Victoria that killed 71 people. So retailers imported an American shopping holiday on top of a domestic tragedy. By 2018, Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined were generating over 400 million dollars in Australian sales. By 2019 that estimate hit four billion. The event now rivals Boxing Day, which had been Australia's defining retail moment for generations.

AtlasCyber Monday is its own creature. The National Retail Federation's digital division, Shop.org, coined the term in a November 2005 press release. The observation was straightforward: home internet in 2005 was largely still dial-up for many Americans, so workers came back from Thanksgiving weekend and did their online shopping from their faster office connections. The Monday spike was real. Shop.org named it, and the name became a self-fulfilling commercial event. First-year sales hit roughly 484 million dollars. By 2024, Adobe Analytics tracked over 13 billion dollars in a single day.

NovaWhat that arc shows is that Black Friday did not spread because of Thanksgiving — the UK and Australia do not celebrate Thanksgiving. It spread because discount culture crosses every border, and once Amazon gave the name a global platform, the mythology traveled with it. The 1869 gold crash, the Philadelphia cops, the failed Big Friday rebrand, the accounting myth — all of that collapsed into one brand. A brand that now moves hundreds of billions of dollars a year worldwide, built on a name that originally meant a day so bad everyone wished it would just end.

AtlasThree separate origins, one stubborn name, and the most profitable retail event in human history. The market has a sense of humor.

Sources

1. How Black Friday became a thing, and why we all fell for itsapeople.com
2. How Black Friday Went From Chaos To A Global Shopping ...ndtv.com
3. black friday sale: Black Friday isn't what it used to be - The Economic Timeseconomictimes.indiatimes.com
4. The Real History of Black Friday - CBS Austincbsaustin.com
5. Common Threads: The Origins of Black Fridaysaturdayeveningpost.com
6. Investigation Into The Causes Of The Gold Panic - The First Edition Rare Booksthefirstedition.com
7. How Black Friday became associated with sales - WUKYwuky.org
8. How Black Friday became associated with saleswuky.org

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