Black Friday

What the day is

Black Friday falls on the day after Thanksgiving, so the date moves each year. It is not a public holiday, though several states give state employees the day off, and many workplaces and schools close, which is part of why it became a shopping day in the first place.

Origin and background

The name came from Philadelphia police in the 1950s and 1960s, describing the traffic and crowds that made the city unmanageable after Thanksgiving. The tidier explanation, that it marks retailers moving from red ink into black, was attached later.

The more useful story is what has happened to it since. Black Friday no longer behaves like a day. Retailers discovered that whoever opened earliest captured the spending, which pushed opening times from dawn back into Thanksgiving evening itself. The competitive logic then ran past the day entirely: sales now begin in early November, and in some markets October, because a discount period that starts sooner than a rival's wins the same shoppers. What was a single event has smeared across a season, and the phrase survives mostly as a marketing label for it.

Online shopping finished the job. Cyber Monday was invented in 2005 to name a genuine spike in workplace internet shopping, and the distinction between the two has since dissolved.

The discounting deserves scrutiny. Consumer groups in several countries have found that a substantial share of advertised reductions are measured against a reference price that was briefly set high beforehand, so the saving exists mainly on the label.

The same date carries a deliberate counter-observance. Buy Nothing Day began in Vancouver in 1992, asking people to purchase nothing for twenty-four hours, and is now marked internationally.

How to take part

• Track the price of anything you want for a few weeks beforehand, which is the only way to identify a real discount.
• Decide what you are buying before looking at what is reduced.
• Be patient and kind with retail staff, who did not set the opening hours.
• Consider Buy Nothing Day instead, which costs nothing by definition.
• Check return windows, which are often shorter on discounted goods.