How did Black Friday start and where did come from?

[Turu]

How did Black Friday start and where did come from?

[James Lavud]

Black Friday is an informal name for the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, the fourth Thursday of November, which has been regarded as the beginning of the country's Christmas shopping season since 1952.

The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".

[Chooli]

Black Friday have a dark history as opposed to the positive connotation it carries today with the big sales, deals and promos. In the 1950's, Philadelphia police used this term to describe the chaos that happened the day after Thanksgiving. On this day, hordes of shoppers and tourists flocked to the city to prepare for the Army-Navy football game. The cops would not be able to take the day off and would have to work extra long shifts to deal with the crowd and traffic. Shoplifters on the other hand, would take advantage of the chaos and add up to the police's head ache. 

Merchants and boosters tried to change the term to Red Friday to remove the negative connotation, but failed. However, retailers found a way to reinvent the meaning and turn it into something that reflected positivity on them and their customers.