No. 330 - Black Friday

My wife participated in the annual Black Friday shopping ritual this morning with her family. My daughter asked where the name Black Friday came from and I couldn't recall, so I had to look it up.

I learned that the earliest reference to "Black Friday" to refer to the day after Thanksgiving was made in a 1966 publication in Philadelphia:

JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.

I do not recall ever hearing that origin but I did recall the alternative theory, which began to be circulated by the early 1980s: 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. When this would be recorded in the financial records, once-common accounting practices would use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period where retailers would no longer have losses (the red) and instead take in the year's profits (the black).