A Brief History of Black Friday

No, it has nothing to do with slavery

Historically speaking, the term “Black Friday” has nothing to do with the sale of slaves, no matter what rumors you may have heard to the contrary. It actually dates back far more recently to 1951, appearing in an engineering magazine with the exciting title Factory Management and Maintenance. The article was about hangovers. I assume it was mostly about hangovers. Because people spent the previous day engaging in much Thanksgiving drunken gluttony, so the author wrote to expect that a lot of those hungover fucks are gonna call in sick on Friday so they can have a four-day weekend. Shortly thereafter cops in Philadelphia started terming it Black Friday as well (and also Black Saturday) because traffic was fucked from everyone wanting to get a jumpstart on their holiday shopping.

Merchants in Philadelphia tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday” in 1961 to make it sound more positive, but people were all fuck that and Black Friday is what stuck. By 1975 the term was appearing in the New York Times in reference to not just the busiest shopping day of the year, but also the busiest for traffic. Move, asshole! The light is fucking GREEN!

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the term gained national attention, and retailers still didn’t like the negative hangover-traffic-jam-stores-filled-with-desperate-shoppers origins, so they decided well shit capitalism isn’t at all negative so rather than try and change the name let’s change the story so people will feel bad for us and consume and consume like the motherfucking apocalypse is imminent.

It is coincidentally true that many retailers lose money all year, and don’t actually end up “in the black” until the end of November. They rely heavily on you buying that Death Star Lego set for little Kyle to turn a profit for the year. Prior to Thanksgiving, many of these retailers were “in the red” for the year. These terms date back to accounting practices using red ink to show negative balances and black ink to show positive ones.

So, no, the term Black Friday did not originate with the whole do your part for the economy and spend spend spend or Macy’s is gonna go out of fucking business, but it came to be synonymous with it via some coincidental timing and powerful marketing.

Since then it’s just gotten totally out of fucking control, spreading to numerous other countries. If you’d really rather not leave the house today, and I don’t blame you, you can support my capitalist ass by giving gifts of my sweary as fuck history books On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down by ordering online. I’m in Romania right now and yeah I’m even seeing Black Friday sales here. I bring it up because I don’t have my laptop and my phone won’t link the fucking thing so you’ll just have to copy and paste that shit:

JamesFell.com/books.