What Is Black Friday?

Business|Black Friday May Have Lost the Chaos but It’s Still Huge for Retailers

Hundreds of customers camped outside a department store at the crack of dawn. A stampede for the hottest new video game console. Fisticuffs over a coveted flat-screen television.

Black Friday was once a cultural phenomenon: For decades, Americans awoke from their post-Thanksgiving slumber to get an early start on their holiday shopping, crowding into malls and big box stores to snap up heavy discounts on items like electronics.

Yet, at a certain point, Americans started caring less about Black Friday. It is still one of the busiest shopping days of the year, but the convenience of buying online and the ubiquity of “Black Friday” discounts long before the day itself arrives have diluted the actual day’s cultural significance.

Here’s what you need to know about Black Friday and the season of discounts:

Why is it called ‘Black Friday’?

Black Friday got its start in the 1960s, when Philadelphia police officers would complain about the mass crowds that descended on the city for the annual Army-Navy football game, which in those days was played the day after Thanksgiving.

Seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the crowds, retailers adopted the term as a reference to when businesses turn a profit — though they had to combat the negative association with the stock market crash of 1929, known as Black Tuesday.

Before long, as demand for discounts grew, stores started competing with each other to see who could open the earliest, going from 5 a.m. on Friday, to midnight, to opening on Thanksgiving itself. In recent years, that trend has reversed, in part because of employee activism. Finally, Black Friday stopped referring to a single day.