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The Origins Of “Black Friday”
In reality, Black Friday isn’t even a thing anymore — the stuff can start a week or so earlier (some Wal-Mart stores were beginning specials last Saturday on various items, jumping Black Friday by a full six days). And when you’re opening doors (“doorbusters”) at 6pm Thursday, creating that whole don’t-make-people-work-on-Thanksgiving narrative, that’s technically not Black Friday either. So maybe the concept has become a bit quaint, and in the next decade, we’ll start to see Christmas deals around Halloween (that’s when Christmas channels now start to proliferate on Pandora). All this said, what exactly are the origins of the term “Black Friday?”
Well, there’s different ideas and timelines — HISTORY IS AN INEXACT SCIENCE, PEOPLE — but it all goes back to one central place (Philly) and one central time (the early to mid 1960s). Wikipedia claims the first appearance was in a 1961 public relations newsletter (or, you know, the financial crisis of 1869 that rocked Grant’s presidency). The Huffington Post has a piece on the origins too; in their re-telling, the Philadelphia Police Department started to refer to the day after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday” around 1966. They wanted to give it a negative connotation so that people would opt out of the idea, because the traffic jams…
