Black Friday’s Dark Roots: How a Day of Police Chaos Became a Global Shopping Spree

Every year, millions of people wake up before dawn, fueled by caffeine and the promise of a 70% discount, to participate in the sacred ritual of Black Friday. It is the Super Bowl of capitalism, a day celebrating the “joy” of spending. The common narrative, repeated by news anchors and corporate press releases, is comforting and logical: “Black Friday is the day retailers finally turn a profit, moving their ledgers from red ink to black ink.”

It is a perfect origin story. It makes sense. It frames the chaos as a necessary engine of the economy.

There is just one problem. It is a complete lie.

The true history of Black Friday has nothing to do with profit margins and everything to do with catastrophe. The term was born not in a boardroom, but in the streets of Philadelphia, coined by exhausted police officers dealing with a city on the verge of collapse. And before that, it referred to a conspiracy that nearly bankrupt the United States government.

The Original “Black Friday” Had Nothing to Do with Shopping

The original Black Friday was a stock market catastrophe in 1869 caused by a conspiracy to corner the gold market, bankrupting thousands of Americans.

Long before it was associated with discounted televisions, “Black Friday” was a term reserved for financial ruin. The first time the phrase entered the American lexicon was September 24, 1869.

Two ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and James Fisk, worked together to buy up as much of the nation’s gold as possible, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astronomical profits. The conspiracy went all the way to the White House, involving the brother-in-law of President Ulysses S. Grant.

On that Friday in September, the conspiracy was finally broken. President Grant figured out the scheme and ordered the Treasury to release $4 million in government gold into the market. Ideally, this would stabilize the price. Instead, it caused a crash. Prices plummeted within minutes. Investors (many of them farmers and workers) were wiped out instantly. The stock market convulsed. It was a day of dark despair, suicide, and ruin.

For almost a century, if you said “Black Friday,” you were not talking about a sale. You were talking about a national trauma.

The Philadelphia “Riot” of the 1950s

The term was coined by Philadelphia police in the 1950s to describe the “black” mood of officers forced to manage gridlock and shoplifters during the Army-Navy game weekend.

Fast forward to the 1950s. The modern usage of the term began in Philadelphia, and it was not a celebration. It was a complaint.

In the 1950s and 60s, Philadelphia was the host of the annual Army-Navy football game, held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This created a “perfect storm” of human density. Suburban tourists would flood the city on Friday to begin their holiday shopping and stay for the game on Saturday.

For the Philadelphia Police Department, the Friday after Thanksgiving was hell on earth. They called it “Black Friday” because no officer was allowed to take the day off. Shifts were extended to 12 hours. The traffic was gridlocked for miles. The sidewalks were so crushed with people that shoplifting spiked because officers simply couldn’t move fast enough to catch anyone.

The term was police slang for a day of darkness, exhaustion, and misery. It was “Black” in the same way a “black eye” is black—it was a mark of injury.

The Failed Rebrand: “Big Friday”

Merchants feared the name scared away customers, so they hired PR firms to rename it “Big Friday,” but the ominous original name had already stuck with the public.

By 1961, the term “Black Friday” had caught on in Philadelphia to the point where merchants were getting nervous. They hated the association. Who wants to shop on a day named after disaster? It sounded like the Plague.

The city’s merchants and boosters hired a public relations expert to solve the problem. Their strategy? Rebrand the day as “Big Friday.” They pushed newspapers to use the new term, hoping it would evoke “Big Savings” and “Big Fun” rather than “Big Traffic Jam.”

It failed miserable. The public, and especially the police and bus drivers who had to work it, refused to adopt the sanitized name. “Black Friday” captured the visceral reality of the day—the soot, the exhaust, the bruising crowds—in a way that “Big Friday” simply didn’t. The dark name stuck because it was honest.

The Great Retail Pivot (The “Red to Black” Myth)

The story that Black Friday represents retailers moving from “red” (loss) to “black” (profit) is a retroactive myth created in the 1980s to sanitize the day’s chaotic reputation.

So how did we get from a police complaint to a national holiday? Propaganda.

As the term spread from Philadelphia to the rest of the country in the 1980s, the retail industry realized they couldn’t stop it. They couldn’t kill the name “Black Friday,” so they decided to rewrite its definition.

They invented the “accounting origin story.” The new narrative went like this: “For most of the year, retailers operate at a loss (in the red). The day after Thanksgiving is the day their sales volume requires them to switch to black ink (profit).”

It was a brilliant stroke of marketing judo. It took a negative (darkness/chaos) and flipped it into a positive (profit/economic health). It turned shoppers from “a nuisance causing traffic” into “patriotic heroes saving the economy.”

But historical records show this explanation didn’t exist until the 1980s. It is a retcon. A reboot of history. The reality is that we celebrate a holiday named after police burnout and traffic accidents, dressed up in the polite fiction of accounting.