Gridlock on Page One

The View from City Hall

Eli: Philadelphia, 1959. The Evening Bulletin sends a reporter named Joseph P. Barrett to cover police administration, working out of City Hall. That's from his own reminiscence, written years later. And at City Hall, he keeps hearing the cops use a phrase for the Friday after Thanksgiving. They call it Black Friday.

Mara: Which is exactly what the listener asked: why is it called Black Friday, and does anyone actually save money on it? Today's angle is how a police headache became a retail ritual.

Eli: The name goes from a police squad room to a front page, through a fight with downtown stores, and out across the country. Whether the bargains riding on it are real low prices is the part that stays open longest.

Mara: And for the police, that Friday ran on a schedule with no slack in it. The day opened Christmas shopping in center city, and it usually brought massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks. Traffic officers were barred from taking the day off. Every one of them reported for a 12-hour shift. Even the police band got sent to Center City, where trombone players directed traffic.

Eli: Here's how the department's name for it was later described: “It is not a term of endearment to them.”

Mara: So Black Friday started as a cops' word for gridlock. The shoppers were the cause, not the celebration.

Eli: Right, the shoppers were the problem to be managed. Then, in the early 1960s, Barrett and the Bulletin's Center City police reporter put together a front-page Thanksgiving story. They borrowed the police term for the terrible traffic. Afterwards Barrett worried they'd made a mistake. So he went to the department's chief inspector to verify it. The chief inspector, tongue in cheek, would say only that Black Friday described the Valentine's Day massacre of mobsters in Chicago.

Mara: Eli, that left a gangland joke of a name on page one, pinned to the very day downtown merchants feared it would scare their holiday shoppers off.

The Big Friday Rebrand

Eli: The earliest print trail linking the name to holiday shopping runs through Thanksgiving 1960. A report that November found its sources bitter about radio bulletins repeating the mayor's plea to leave cars at home. They were just as bitter about police officials forecasting record traffic jams, both vehicular and pedestrian, for “black Friday.” A year later, in 1961, comes the first citation for Black Friday as the start of the Christmas shopping season.

Mara: So the warning and the shopping shared a sentence from the very start.

Eli: And downtown hated it. Center City merchants complained to the police commissioner that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. The year after Barrett's front-page story, the commissioner put out a press release calling the day Big Friday. Barrett and his partner kept writing Black Friday on page one anyway. Big Friday, and its cousin Big Saturday, never caught on.

Mara: Then the merchants came round in their own way. By the early sixties, stores and papers in Philly were regularly referring to Black Friday sales and events. It stayed a local word for years.

Eli: The police had hoped the name would turn shoppers away. In the end, that branding backfired. By 1975, a Gimbels sales manager was watching a traffic cop try to control a crowd of jaywalkers. Her take on the drivers: “They think in terms of headaches it gives them.” And: “That’s why the bus drivers and cab drivers call today ‘Black Friday.’” Fifteen years on, the word still belonged to the people stuck in the traffic, not the people at the tills.

Absenteeism and Financial Panic

Mara: The traffic squad wasn't the first to darken that Friday, though. In November 1951, a trade magazine, Factory Management and Maintenance, ran an article titled “Friday After Thanksgiving.” It was about workers calling in sick to stretch the holiday into a four-day weekend. That's the earliest known Black Friday for the day after Thanksgiving. Bonnie Taylor Blake, a researcher, says there's no evidence the term was particularly widely used that way.

Eli: So factory bosses and traffic cops dreaded the same day, for different reasons.

Mara: And one origin story needs knocking down. A claim keeps circulating on social media that the name comes from post-Thanksgiving discounts on enslaved people. It's false. Major field work didn't happen until spring. And Thanksgiving wasn't set to one national date until Lincoln's proclamation in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War being fought to end slavery.

Eli: So the rumour hangs on a holiday that didn't even have a fixed date.

Mara: Then there's the bookkeeping language people tie to the name. “In the red” is on record from 1907. “In the black” from 1923. Both are plain ledger phrases, decades older than any shopping sense of Black Friday.

Eli: And the name itself is older than both. Its most famous early outing was Wall Street, September 24, 1869. At one point Gould offered a go-between $100,000 interest, and exclaimed that he was undone if a certain letter got out. Then the price of gold fell, and Wall Street panicked. That crash became the original Black Friday.

Mara: And the crash people usually blame, 1929, happened on a Tuesday.

Eli: By the time Barrett wrote, whether that street meaning would survive the people selling things that day, and whether their bargains would hold up, was still wide open.

The Ledger Fable and the Price Check

Mara: Back to Barrett for a moment. The year after the reporters’ Thanksgiving story, Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown issued a press release calling the day “Big Friday.” But a name that meant gridlock on the street, and panic on Wall Street before that, was still a problem for the stores.

Eli: In the 1980s the stores found their way out. Retailers, in Philadelphia and beyond, spun a new connotation: the day their books went from red ink to black. Being in the black is old bookkeeping, black ink for gains, red for losses. The story said holiday sales finally pushed stores into profit. Bonnie Taylor Blake had heard it, didn't believe it, and went through old newspapers and trade magazines. She calls it a clever “if you can’t beat them, join them” tactic by retailers, and it spread with the name.

Mara: So the ledger story didn't explain the name. Set beside the dates, it reads as a rewrite laid over decades of gridlock and panic. And the traffic officer who first said Black Friday, back in the 1950s, isn't on record by name.

Eli: And it travelled. The Los Angeles Times first printed Black Friday in 1989. By then the traffic cops' complaint was becoming a marketing tool for retailers nationwide. And if the name's history could be invented, a discount could be too.

Mara: Which?, the British consumer group, checks exactly that. Its researchers follow a product's price across the year around the sale, not just the day itself. Its research has found 83 to 98 percent of Black Friday products cheaper or the same price at other times. That's the watchdog's tally, and what it means for real savings is still argued over. Retailers are also accused of a trick called false benchmarking: push an item's price up just before the sale, then mark it back down, so the cut looks deeper than it is.

Eli: So the trick lives in the old price, not the sale price.

Mara: Here's one shelf. On Black Friday in 2024, John Lewis advertised a Samsung robot vacuum at £350, about 470 dollars. The tag said it was down from £500. But it had only sat at £500 since the start of October. Back in early summer, for about a month, the same store sold it for £299.

Eli: So a cheaper stretch for that vacuum came in early summer, not on the big day. That leaves the deals stores point to as the real ones: the doorbusters and the TVs.

The Doorbuster Dilemma

Mara: Doorbusters first. They're strictly limited loss leaders, a TV or a laptop priced low for a short window to pull people through the door. One retail report says limited doorbuster deals, rather than store-wide discounts, help retailers preserve margins while still grabbing attention. Consumer Reports warns there are no guarantees, and usually no rain checks.

Eli: Philadelphia's cops worked 12-hour shifts to clear crowds. Doorbusters are built to draw them.

Mara: The TVs have their own wrinkle. Manufacturers make derivative models for Black Friday: near-copies of the regular sets, with a different model number and often fewer features. They're often sold through a single retailer, which limits any price comparison. It's a quieter cousin of the inflated old price.

Eli: So the sale TV and the regular TV aren't quite the same set.

Mara: Close, though. Consumer Reports tested a 55-inch Samsung derivative. It was $170 cheaper than the regular version, and in their testing the two performed almost identically, minus voice control and Bluetooth. Deirdre Kennedy says, “These models tend to stick around past the holidays and become part of the brands' regular assortment.”

Eli: That's one reading of the evidence: some savings are real. Kennedy and analysts like Tod Marks hold it. A Consumers' Checkbook study across 25 big retailers found more than half the tracked items on sale perpetually, yet Costco, Apple and Target consistently offered genuine sales off real regular prices. And select video game consoles, streaming sticks and small personal electronics are said to offer legitimate value on the day, a claim that's still disputed.

Mara: Eli, consumer watchdogs read price tracking another way. Reena Sewraz, retail editor at Which?, puts it plainly: “for the majority of shoppers, Black Friday is a false economy”—an apparent bargain where chasing discounts makes people spend more. She says retailers are leaning on hype and urgency to sell.

Eli: The Christian Science Monitor put it this way: for people looking for deep discounts, Black Friday is still a red-letter day. But no price data shows whether shoppers actually save.

Mara: So it's called Black Friday because Philadelphia's traffic police named their worst day of gridlock, and the profit story came decades later. Some shoppers do find real savings on select doorbusters and electronics, while watchdogs tracking prices find most deals matched or beaten at other times. The grim name on Barrett's front page was the true one. The cheerful version was the one that had to be invented.

Eli: Three things would sharpen the picture. Police records naming the officer on the Center City traffic squad who first said it in the 1950s. Advertising archives showing who first dreamed up the red-to-black story. And research that adds up a whole holiday basket, not one deal at a time.

Mara: Dig into In the black.

Eli: And stay with us on business.

Mara: Thanks for spending this time with us. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Until next time, this has been Angle.