Biggest shopping day of the year: The history behind Black Friday

We reveal how America’s Thanksgiving and Black Friday are intertwined and how the shopping day’s influence has become a global institution.

17:10 28 November 2014

Following Thanksgiving feasts, millions of Americans go to different shopping malls in the country on the Friday before the holiday for bargains.  It’s a tradition that has extended across the pond and landed firmly on our shores too but what really is Black Friday and why does it drive thousands of shoppers to stores?

Below are 10 amazing facts about the most commercial day on the calendar.

1.    The term Black Friday, which has been used for various calamities, was first used on September 24, 1869 when two speculators tried to manipulate the New York Stock Exchange. However, the government stepped in and flooded the market with gold. This resulted to prices going down and investors losing enormous amount of money.

2.    US Thanksgiving Parades were inspired by Canadian department store Eaton’s, which introduced “Santa Clause parade” on December 02, 1905. Once Santa appeared at the end of the parade, the signal was that the holiday season and thus holiday shopping was being ushered in.

3.    Thanksgiving’s date was determined by holiday shoppers. Thanksgiving was initially celebrated on the last Thursday of November, which could either fall on the fourth or fifth Thursday in the month. However in 1939, the last Thursday was the last day in November. Fearing that the shortened holiday will affect sales, retailers encouraged then-President Franklin D Roosevelt to declare the holiday a week earlier.

4.    'Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis' – in 1951, a circular drew attention to the suspiciously high level of sickness that day. It said: "'Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis' is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that's the feeling of those who have to get production out, when Black Friday comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick - and can prove it.”

5.    Philadelphia is where the term Black Friday was first used. The city used the term after police officers got frustrated by the congestion caused by shoppers and deemed it a very dark day indeed. Retailers, who were unhappy being associated with traffic and smog, tried to reband the day “Big Friday” but it didn’t stick. 

6.    Black Friday became an official term in the 1990s. "You see it spreading a little bit to Trenton, New Jersey, which is close by, but it doesn't really start getting mentioned outside of Philadelphia until the 1980s," says says linguist Benjamin Zimmer, executive editor of Vocabulary.com. "It didn't become widespread until the mid-90s."

7.    Black Friday became the biggest shopping day of the year in 2001.

8.    Nearly a quarter of Brits buy at least one gift during the Black Friday sales.

9.    Brits spend an average of £775 on Christmas this year which represents a rise of £17 since Christmas 2013.

10.    In protest, Buy Nothing Day was launched in Canada in 1992 as "a day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption".