Every year, millions of Americans hit the stores the Friday after Thanksgiving in the hopes of scoring a great deal on a 4K TV or the latest toy craze. Although Black Friday has practically become a holiday of its own, it hasn’t always been this way.
For a century, the term Black Friday was associated with a 19th-century financial crisis. In 1869, two scheming Wall Street financiers bought as much gold as they could with the hopes of artificially driving up the price and selling at an astronomical profit. Instead, the gold market collapsed and took the stock market with it, bankrupting millions on Friday, September 24.
Black Friday kept its negative connotation throughout the early 20th century, when business owners would complain about workers calling in sick the Friday after Thanksgiving, sapping productivity and wreaking havoc on the economy.
Black Friday wouldn’t be tied to post-Thanksgiving shopping until the late 1950s, when Philadelphia police gave the derisive nickname to the flood of rowdy tourists that descended on the city before the Army-Navy football game, snarling traffic and overwhelming retailers. In fact, Black Friday didn’t take on its current more positive significance as America’s most popular holiday shopping day until the 1980s.
