Thanksgiving Day holiday shoppers line up with television sets on discount at the Target retail store in Chicago, Illinois, in 2013.
Though Black Friday became one of the biggest and busiest shopping days of the year, it wasn’t always that way.
Before it exploded into the national, post-Thanksgiving holiday we know today, it was reportedly a quirky tradition unique to Philadelphians.
Here’s the evolution of Black Friday, from its 19th-century namesake to the shopping phenomenon it is today.
The day after Thanksgiving has long marked the beginning of the holiday shopping season, starting with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924.The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1933.
AP
Source: Insider
The behemoth retailer used the parade as a living and breathing advertisement ahead of the Christmas season.The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1930.
AP
Source: Insider
It helped cement the Friday after Thanksgiving as the ultimate holiday shopping day.A Macy’s department store during the New York holiday season in 1931.
AP
Source: Insider
But then the Great Depression hit a few years later in 1929.Wall Street in 1929.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Source: History
Retailers relied on holiday sales so heavily that they petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 to move Thanksgiving up a week.
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Source: Time
Thanksgiving fell on the fifth Thursday of November that year, and an extra week would give Americans more time to shop, so he obliged in order to lift the slumped economy.
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Source: Time
But he waited until October to announce the change, and many didn’t honor it, leading to essentially two Thanksgivings being held that year.President Franklin D. Roosevelt at a Thanksgiving dinner in the 1930s.
AP
Source: Time
The moved-up Thanksgiving was known as “Franksgiving.”
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Source: Time
But, eventually, the new Thanksgiving caught on.
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Source: National Archives
And in 1941, President Roosevelt signed a resolution forever establishing the fourth Thursday instead of the last Thursday of November as the national Thanksgiving holiday …An American family enjoys an outdoor Thanksgiving dinner in 1956.
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Source: National Archives
… which ensured that Americans had an extra week to shop.
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Source: National Archives
By the 1950s, the phenomenon of Black Friday had yet to fully materialize, though the day after Thanksgiving remained a common Christmas shopping occasion.A Gilchrist’s department store in Boston in 1955.
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It was during this time, however, that “Black Friday” was first used to describe shopping mania.
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Source: History
Back then, the Army-Navy football game was held on the Saturday after each Thanksgiving in Philadelphia.
AP
Source: History
The Friday before saw throngs of people pour into the city ahead of the game to shop, much to the chagrin of cops, who couldn’t take the day off and who were instead tasked with managing the chaotic congestion.A train brings passengers into the city of Philadelphia in the 1950s.
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Source: BBC
They christened the Friday “Black Friday,” a name borrowed from a stock-market tizzy in 1869 that was spurred by plummeting gold prices.An illustration of the stock market panic on September 24, 1869.
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Source: Britannica
The term was eventually embraced by Philadelphia business owners, but not before they attempted to rebrand the event “Big Friday” to remove any negative connotation.
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Source: CNN Money, History
Obviously, it didn’t stick, and Black Friday remained a quirky Philadelphia tradition.
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Source: BBC
But then, in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, retailers outside of Philadelphia cleverly tried to flip the negative-sounding “Black Friday” into something they could profit from.
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Source: History
That included coming up with a different origin story for the name of the shopping bonanza.
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Source: BBC
This is when the “going into the black” concept was born, named after the business practice of recording one’s losses in red and one’s profits in black.
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Source: BBC
The idea was that the day after Thanksgiving would bring in so many sales that it would push businesses “out of the red” and “into the black.”
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Source: History
Although it is true that the holiday season is a profitable time for retailers, various reports debunk that story as the true meaning behind “Black Friday.”
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Source: History, CNN Money, BBC
Nevertheless, that’s the story that was used to explain the meaning behind the term.
Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Source: CNN Money
By the 1990s, Black Friday hadn’t yet turned into the shopping extravaganza we know today, but it was an unofficial retail holiday of sorts.
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Source: Time
It grew more and more popular, with crowds rising in numbers as well.Shoppers queue in front of a Marshall Fields department store in Chicago the day after Thanksgiving in 1996.
Beth A. Keiser
Source: Insider
Around 2002, Black Friday became the season’s biggest shopping day.Texas shoppers in a Target the day after Thanksgiving in 2003.
Tony Gutierrez/AP
Source: Time
Prior to that, the Saturday before Christmas was the shopping day that brought in the most retail sales.
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Source: BBC
Black Friday also became an unexpectedly competitive sport, so much so that customers became willing to literally camp out in store parking lots just to be the first to get their hands on bargains.
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Source: Fortune
TVs, sometimes on sale for under $800, are some of the most popular items to buy through Black Friday deals.
George Frey/Getty Images
Source: Black Friday
But so are other electronics, like video games and movies, beauty products, and clothing.
George Frey/Getty Images
The deals are sometimes so appealing to consumers that Black Friday has entered markets in countries that don’t normally celebrate Thanksgiving, like the UK and Brazil.Shoppers in Brazil fight over televisions on Black Friday in 2016.
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Source: Insider
Employees would even have pre-opening group huddles to prepare for the onslaught of shopping hysteria.
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Black Friday events have also seen their share of violence, unruly crowds, damaged store goods, and even stampedes.
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
Source: Insider
There have even been fatalities. In 2008, an employee was trampled to death by eager shoppers at a New York Walmart.
Ed Betz/AP
Source: NY Daily News
That same year, the Great Recession hit.A financial specialist on the New York Stock Exchange floor.
David Karp/AP
Source: Fortune
By 2010, retailers were still licking their wounds from a calamitous couple of slumped holiday seasons. They started offering heavily discounted items and doorbuster sales.
Shawn Rocco with The News & Observer/AP
Source: Fortune
Sales weren’t confined to just the day after Thanksgiving any longer, either: Around that time, retailers began opening their doors on Thanksgiving Day.Toys R Us shoppers in New York on Thanksgiving in 2012.
John Minchillo/AP
Source: Fortune
Toys R Us, for example, set a 10 p.m. opening time on Thanksgiving, while Sears opened its doors from 7 a.m. to noon.
John Minchillo/AP
Source: Fortune
Walmart also began opening doors on Thanksgiving evening in 2011.
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Source: BBC
The Black Friday creep had officially begun. Some retailers even began starting their sales as early as the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.
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Source: Macy’s
The bargain-shopping days leading up to Black Friday were dubbed White Wednesday and Grey Thursday, though those names never really stuck.
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Source: ABC 15 Arizona
But what stuck was Cyber Monday. Coined by the National Retail Federation in 2005, the name caught on with retailers a year later. By 2010, it had surpassed Black Friday as the holiday shopping day with the most sales.An ad on the Best Buy website for a Cyber Monday sale in 2017.
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Source: Insider
In the 2010s, retailers competed with one another by offering bigger and better Black Friday sales each November. Deals got more and more appealing, discounted prices lower, and store hours longer.
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Source: Fortune
In 2013, Kmart announced that it would stay open for 41 hours straight beginning at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, while Big Lots said it would be open on Thanksgiving starting at 7 a.m. until midnight.A Chicago Kmart on Thanksgiving in 2013.
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Source: Fortune
But with Black Friday no longer confined to a 24-hour period, the post-Thanksgiving shopping day began to decrease in popularity. Plus, the advent of Cyber Monday meant some shoppers were staying home and shopping online instead.
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Source: Fortune
By 2017, consumers who visited stores that were traditionally crammed with people, like Best Buy and Target, were met with considerably thinner crowds.A Target store on Black Friday in 2017.
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Source: Insider
All signs pointed to Black Friday as we knew it beginning to die — gone were the people camped outside and the hordes scrambling for popular toys.
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Source: Insider
“Is [Black Friday] the mayhem that it might have been eight or 10 years ago?” Walmart’s then-US CEO, Greg Foran, asked The Wall Street Journal in 2017. “I think that world is gone.”
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Source: Insider, WSJ
In 2019, online shoppers spent $7.4 billion on Black Friday, almost as much as they’d spent on Cyber Monday the year before. It was a sign that the holiday shopping season was no longer confined to one big spending day — it was stretched out over a full weekend, and a lot of it was happening online.
Julio Cortez/AP
Source: Retail Dive
Then the pandemic hit. The early months threw the economy into turmoil, but by November, shoppers were ready to spend. Flush with stimulus dollars, US consumers spent $9 billion on Black Friday, an increase of 21.6% from the year prior.Shoppers wait for a computer games store to open on Black Friday at the Tysons Corner Center in Tysons, Virginia, on November 27, 2020.
REUTERS/Hannah McKay
Source: ABC News
Still, most shoppers stayed away from shopping in person as the coronavirus raged on. Stores in the US saw about 52% less foot traffic than the same day in 2019, according to one report.
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Source: Insider
The holiday got a slight rebound by 2021, with shoppers returning to stores (though not at pre-pandemic levels). But the data showed the shoppers had started to spend earlier in the year, making Black Friday and the other spending holidays less of the shopping extravaganza they once were.Shoppers enter a Best Buy store during Black Friday sales in Westbury, New York, in 2021.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Source: Insider
“Consumers have been shopping strategically this season: Buying early and taking advantage of deals retailers have been promoting since late October,” Adobe Digital Insights Director Taylor Schreiner said in 2021. “Black Friday still remains a major online shopping day, but the surge in online shopping is coming from the less marketed days of the season.”An empty shopping cart stands outside a Target store during a Black Friday sales event in Westbury, New York.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Source: Insider
Katie Canales contributed to an earlier version of this article.
