Black Friday

For centuries, the adjective "black" has been applied to days upon which calamities occurred. Many events have been described as "Black Friday", although the most significant such event in American history was the Panic of 1869, which occurred when financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk took advantage of their connections with the Ulysses S. Grant administration in an attempt to corner the gold market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold, which halted the run and caused prices to drop by 18%. Fortunes were made and lost in a single day, and the president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined.

The earliest known use of "Black Friday" to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurred in the journal, Factory Management and Maintenance, for November 1951, and again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, in order to have a four-day weekend. However, this use does not appear to have caught on. Around the same time, the terms "Black Friday" and "Black Saturday" came to be used by the police in Philadelphia and Rochester to describe the crowds and traffic congestion accompanying the start of the Christmas shopping season. In 1961, the city and merchants of Philadelphia attempted to improve conditions, and a public relations expert recommended rebranding the days "Big Friday" and "Big Saturday", but these terms were quickly forgotten.

The use of the phrase spread slowly, first appearing in The New York Times on November 29, 1975, in which it still refers specifically to "the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year" in Philadelphia. Although it soon became more widespread, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1985 that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were still unaware of the term.

As the phrase gained national attention in the early 1980s, merchants objecting to the use of a derisive term to refer to one of the most important shopping days of the year suggested an alternative derivation: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving. …

Thanksgiving's relationship to Christmas shopping led to controversy in the 1930s. Retail stores would have liked to have a longer shopping season, but no store wanted to break with tradition and be the one to start advertising before Thanksgiving. For this reason, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a presidential proclamation proclaiming Thanksgiving to be the fourth Thursday in November rather than the last Thursday, meaning in some years one week earlier, in order to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. Most people adopted the President's change, which was later reinforced by an act of Congress, but many continued to celebrate Thanksgiving on the traditional date.

In 2015, Amazon.com was the first to offer "Black Friday in July" deals on what they called "Prime Day", promising better deals than on Black Friday. Amazon repeated the practice in 2016 and 2017, and other companies began offering similar deals.

Analyst Marshal Cohen of The NPD Group claimed in 2020 that Black Friday is declining in favor of online shopping, and that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process. The pandemic also resulted in holiday deals being offered over a longer period of time, even as early as October. Fewer people shopped in person on Black Friday 2020, and most business took place online. Market research company Numerator said sellers of clothing, tools and other items considered nonessential during lockdowns were not promoted as heavily because lower production meant less available to sell. Adobe Analytics reported that online sales reached $9 billion in 2020, 22% more than the previous year. Foot traffic to stores fell 48% in 2020 from last year, according to RetailNext, while Sensormatic Solutions reported a 52% decrease.

For many years, retailers pushed opening times on Black Friday earlier and earlier, eventually reaching midnight, before opening on the evening of Thanksgiving. Kmart opened its stores on Thanksgiving as early as 1991, and was open on Thanksgiving Day for many years. In 2009, Kmart manager Freddy Moss opened at 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving in order to allow shoppers to avoid Black Friday traffic and return home in time for dinner with their families. Two years later, a number of retailers began opening at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., on what became derisively known as "Black Thursday". …

Black Friday, in Egypt, started in 2014, being introduced as White Friday. The change of name was due to religious, traditional, and cultural concepts.

Black Friday deals started in Libya since 2019, also introduced as White Friday due to religious, traditional and cultural concepts.

The use of Black Friday shopping terminology started in 2014 in major cities of Pakistan which later changed to "Blessed Friday" due to religious reasons. Now Blessed Friday (Black Friday) shopping festival is being observed regularly all over Pakistan.

The holiday shopping season in India has traditionally been aligned around the "festive period" of major festivals usually falling around October or November, such as Diwali. Similar to US-style shopping events such as Black Friday, online retailers adopted the practice of holding multi-day promotions during this period, such as Amazon's "Great Indian Festival" and Flipkart's "Big Billion Days". India's Independence Day (August 15) had also recently attracted similar events.

Nonetheless, the concept of Black Friday has also been imported into the subcontinent via international retailers – a move that influenced some Indian retailers to also adopt the promotion.

In Saudi Arabia, black Friday started when a local e-commerce platform noon.com created Yellow Friday Sale which is now an annual event.

U.A.E. Black Friday started as White Friday campaign in 2014. In 2018 local e-commerce platform noon.com created Yellow Friday in the U.A.E. The Yellow Friday Sale is now an annual event in U.A.E., falling around the same time as Black Friday globally.

Black Friday is celebrated in China in a limited capacity commercially instead of as a major retail sale. Certain e-commerce platforms will run Black Friday promotions around late November offering deals on electronics, fashion, and imported goods.

Black Friday in Belgium has been seriously marketed by retailers since 2016. Online shops especially have broken sales records during the last edition of Black Friday, which provides a base for the further growth of Black Friday's popularity in Belgium. After 2016, Black Friday in Belgium has grown strongly. The number of participating shops have increased to over seventy during the Black Friday period of 2017. …

Some online stores invest a lot of money in promotional campaigns to generate more sales and drive traffic to their stores. However, they often forget about the high loads their sites are going to experience. According to Retail Gazette, "A number of major retailers' websites went down as they failed to cope with the surge in Black Friday traffic in 2017 ... This just highlights that some retailers have not taken the necessary steps to prepare for Black Friday. Failing to prepare for peak can cause poor performance, site downtime, and ultimately lost revenue for retailers". Such carelessness results in huge reputational damage. Moreover, the 2017 Veeam Availability Report in South Africa found that "Unplanned downtime costs organisations around the world an average of R270m annually, up from the R210m of the previous year".

Some websites offer information about day-after-Thanksgiving specials up to a month in advance. The text listings of items and prices are usually accompanied by pictures of the actual ad circulars. These are either leaked by insiders or intentionally released by large retailers to give consumers insight and allow them time to plan.

In recent years, some retailers (including Walmart, Target, OfficeMax, Big Lots, and Staples) have claimed that the advertisements they send in advance of Black Friday and the prices included in those advertisements are copyrighted and are trade secrets. Some of these retailers have used the take-down system of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a means to remove the offending price listings.

The benefit of threatening Internet sites with a DMCA-based lawsuit has proved tenuous at best. While some sites have complied with the requests, others have either ignored the threats or simply continued to post the information under the name of a similar-sounding fictional retailer. However, careful timing may mitigate the take-down notice. An Internet service provider in 2003 brought suit against Best Buy, Kohl's, and Target Corporation, arguing that the take-down notice provisions of the DMCA are unconstitutional. …

The National Retail Federation releases figures on the sales for each Thanksgiving week-end. The Federation's definition of "Black Friday week-end" includes Thursday, Friday, Saturday and projected spending for Sunday. The survey estimates number of shoppers, not number of people.

The length of the shopping season is not the same across all years: the date for Black Friday varies between November 23 and 29, while Christmas Eve is fixed at December 24.