Black Friday went from local headache to global shopping ritual in a few decades. People camp outside stores, websites crash, trucks stack up at ports and hubs, and everyone pretends this year they will “just buy a few things.”
The funny part is that the real story behind Black Friday has almost nothing to do with cheerful holiday marketing.
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So where did “Black Friday” actually come from?
The phrase “Black Friday” has been used for nasty events since the 1800s, long before anyone lined up for a discounted TV.
1869: A financial panic with the same name
In 1869, two Wall Street speculators, Jay Gould and James Fisk, tried to corner the US gold market. When their scheme collapsed on Friday, September 24, gold prices crashed and stocks followed. Newspapers called it “Black Friday” because of the financial carnage.
That episode has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, retail, or shopping. It just shows that “Black Friday” was already shorthand for “very bad day” on Wall Street.
1951: The boss’s “Black Friday” sick-day problem
The first real connection between the day after Thanksgiving and “Black Friday” shows up in a 1951 article in Factory Management and Maintenance.
The magazine used the term to complain about workers calling in “sick” the Friday after Thanksgiving to get a four-day weekend.
So the first modern Black Friday was a management headache, not a doorbuster blowout.
1950s–1960s: Philadelphia police coin the version we use today
The modern meaning clearly comes from Philadelphia.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, the city’s police started calling the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” because downtown was jammed with shoppers and visitors ahead of the Army–Navy football game that weekend. Traffic locked up, shoplifting spiked, and police worked long overtime shifts.
Local media picked up the term in the early 1960s, and it spread through the region. Retailers hated how gloomy it sounded and tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday” in the 1960s. That went nowhere.
So the shopping “Black Friday” starts with Philly cops, traffic, and chaos, not a glossy ad campaign.
The “back in the black” explanation came later
You have probably heard the feel-good version: stores run at a loss all year, marked in red ink, then finally turn profitable, or “in the black,” on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
That story shows up in print decades after the police slang, including a 1981 Philadelphia Inquirer article that frames it as a way merchants tried to spin the term in a more positive light.
It sounds neat. It is not the original reason people said “Black Friday.”
No, it didn’t start with slave auctions
There is a viral internet claim that Black Friday started with discounted slave auctions held the day after Thanksgiving.
Fact-checkers and historians have gone looking for any evidence of this and found none. Snopes and lexicographers who study the history of the term reject it outright.
Unpleasant truth: the day has ugly parts, but the origin story is bureaucratic frustration and city traffic, not a secret code for slavery.
How a local headache turned into a global sales frenzy
For a long time, Black Friday was just a busy shopping day after Thanksgiving. It only became “the Super Bowl of retail” once national chains and big-box stores got creative.
From busy day to “biggest shopping day of the year”
Through the 1970s, newspapers mentioned “Black Friday” mostly in Philadelphia. A 1975 New York Times story even explains that the term is mainly used in that city.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, national retailers started leaning into the date with heavy advertising, doorbusters, and “while supplies last” deals. The day started to challenge other December Saturdays for the title of busiest shopping day. By the early 2000s, it had the reputation of being the biggest day on the retail calendar in the United States.
Black Friday, but make it a month
What used to be one frantic morning has spread across November.
Retailers first stretched doorbusters through the entire day, then the weekend, then the whole week. Before the pandemic, many chains even opened on Thanksgiving evening. After COVID, labor pushback, and some public fatigue, a lot of major chains reversed course and stay closed on Thanksgiving again, shifting attention back to Friday and to online deals that run all month.
From a logistics point of view, that matters more than the marketing slogans. It turns one tidal wave into a series of big waves.
Black Friday goes global
Black Friday’s now observed in well over a hundred countries. One analysis puts some form of Black Friday sale in at least 129 markets.
Many of those countries don’t celebrate US Thanksgiving at all. Retailers simply imported the date and the brand, then tweaked it:
- Mexico runs “El Buen Fin” in mid-November, a long weekend of discounts tied to a national holiday.
- In the Middle East and North Africa, brands created “White Friday” or “Yellow Friday” to avoid dark associations and fit regional culture.
- Turkey uses “Efsane Cuma,” which translates to “Legendary Friday.”
Retailers in Canada, the UK, Europe, South Africa, India, Brazil and plenty of other countries now run Black Friday promotions even though the day originally came from a single American city.
It’s not even a federal holiday
The US government has an official list of federal holidays. The Friday after Thanksgiving is not one of them.
Some states, like California and Texas, treat it as a state holiday so government offices can close. Nevada labels it “Family Day.”
On the same calendar day, the United States also observes Native American Heritage Day, intended to honor Indigenous peoples and cultures.
That sits alongside the biggest shopping event of the year, which creates a strange split-screen effect.
The numbers behind Black Friday today
If you only look at memes of people wrestling over TVs, you miss how much has shifted online.
Shopper counts and spending
For the 2024 Thanksgiving weekend (Thursday through Monday), the National Retail Federation estimated about 197 million US shoppers in stores or online, one of the highest tallies on record.
Black Friday itself was the standout:
- Roughly 81.7 million people shopped in physical stores
- Roughly 87.3 million shopped online
On the internet side, Adobe estimated US Black Friday online sales at about 10.8 billion dollars in 2024, up a little over 10 percent from the year before.
Globally, Salesforce data points to 74.4 billion dollars spent online in 24 hours on Black Friday 2024.
Phones and “buy now, pay later”
More than half of US online purchases between November 1 and Black Friday 2024 were made on mobile devices.
Shoppers are also leaning harder on installment plans. Buy Now, Pay Later options accounted for about 7 percent of online spending during that early-November through Black Friday window, roughly 7.6 billion dollars.
What people actually buy
Electronics, toys, gaming, small appliances, beauty products, and clothing tend to surge. Adobe’s tracking shows:
- Toys spiking to nearly triple a typical October day’s online sales
- Heavy discounting on TVs, appliances, and “giftable” gadgets
The picture that emerges: Black Friday is still huge, but a lot of that action now runs quietly through phones and delivery networks, not just parking lots.
Black Friday is big, but Singles’ Day is bigger
In China, Singles’ Day around November 11 has grown into a shopping event that dwarfs Black Friday.
In 2024, Singles’ Day generated around 1.44 trillion yuan in gross merchandise value, roughly 202 billion dollars across Chinese platforms.
So Black Friday is not the peak of global ecommerce, just one very large spike on a crowded calendar.
Facts about Black Friday you probably haven’t heard
- The UK already had a “Black Friday,” and it was about drinking – in Britain, emergency services used the phrase for the last Friday before Christmas, when alcohol-related incidents jump. Retailers only later imported the American sale and attached the same name.
- Black Friday shares a date with Native American Heritage Day – while shoppers chase deals, federal law sets the same day aside as a civil observance honoring Indigenous peoples. The split between those two activities is not lost on Native communities.
- There is a “Buy Nothing Day” on the same date – activists created Buy Nothing Day in Canada in 1992, and it spread to the United States and Europe. The idea is simple: spend zero for 24 hours as a protest against overconsumption.
- Some markets renamed Black Friday to soften the tone – in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, you see “White Friday” or “Yellow Friday” instead, and Mexico uses “El Buen Fin.”
- It is not always the biggest shopping day – in places like the UK and some Commonwealth countries, Boxing Day still competes strongly. In China, Singles’ Day is on another level entirely.
- One US neighborhood keeps topping the traffic charts – location-tracking analyses cited in Black Friday research highlight the SouthPark area in Charlotte, North Carolina, as one of the most congested spots in the country on Black Friday.
What Black Friday really means for brands and logistics
On the business side, Black Friday is less about one big day and more about how you handle a long, messy peak season.
Billions of packages in a narrow window
Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, US carriers handle billions of parcels. One 2024 forecast put that period at about 2.2 billion packages across USPS, UPS, FedEx, and others, with roughly 2.3 billion expected for the following year.
To cope, carriers add peak surcharges for parcels, oversized items, residential deliveries, and high-volume shippers from October through January.
For brands, this translates to higher unit costs, tighter capacity, and less flexibility if planning is weak.
The season is longer than the marketing slogans
Black Friday and Cyber Monday sit in the middle of what is now “peak quarter.”
Adobe and industry data show multiple November days where online sales easily clear four billion dollars in the United States alone, not just on those marquee days.
That shift favors merchants who:
- Stage inventory closer to where customers are
- Treat Black Friday as one milestone inside a six-to-eight-week plan
- Avoid rolling the dice on one desperate, margin-killing weekend
This is exactly where a 3PL relationship matters. A partner like Speed Commerce can help brands preload inventory across fulfillment centers, smooth out the spikes, and avoid last-minute air freight that destroys profit.
