Black Friday’s Dark Origins: From Financial Panic to Retail Chaos

Most people think Black Friday was always about door-buster deals and viral videos of people trampling each other, but the phrase has uglier roots. The earliest use of the phrase “Black Friday” in American public life actually referred to a financial panic in 1869, when attempts to corner the gold market produced a crash that wrecked markets and livelihoods. That original meaning of economic calamity gives the modern shopping frenzy an ironic, even grim, pedigree.

The tale gets stranger in the 20th century when Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1939, shifted Thanksgiving a week earlier—ostensibly to give merchants an extra week of holiday shopping—touching off a national uproar and years of confusion that Congress finally resolved in 1941 by fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday. What started as an executive fiat for the sake of commerce became a constitutional headache and a public rebuke of presidential overreach. This episode is a clear reminder that when Washington reaches into tradition for economic tinkering, it often wrecks both civic trust and simple family rhythms.

Fast-forward to mid-century Philadelphia and you find a different origin story for the modern Black Friday: police officers and city workers used the term in the 1950s and 60s to describe the chaos of traffic, crowds and shoplifting the day after Thanksgiving. That local, law-enforcement shorthand—less about profit and more about disorder—slowly migrated into national vocabulary before retailers sanitized it for marketing purposes. The reality is the phrase was born out of civic strain, not retail triumph.

By the 1980s the retail industry had done what big business always does: rebrand an inconvenient truth into a profit narrative. Merchants recast Black Friday as the day books turn “from red to black,” turning a term rooted in disorder into a feel-good story about commerce rescuing the balance sheet. That spin laid the groundwork for decades of escalating consumer hysteria, aggressive advertising, and a holiday season increasingly driven by corporate calendars instead of communal gratitude.

Conservatives ought to take special notice: this is exactly the kind of cultural erosion that comes from comfortable alliances between government and corporations. When a president can move a national holiday to grease the wheels for retailers, and then corporations can rename chaos into celebration, the everyday citizen loses out—tradition, family time, and common sense are traded away for margins and market share. Whatever your view of the past, it’s instructive that this transformation was engineered by people in power and their business partners, not by ordinary families seeking a quieter holiday.

Today’s spectacle—sensationalized crowds, nighttime lineups, headline-grabbing brawls—is the predictable endgame of decades of commercialization. If we want Thanksgiving to mean more than a shopping calendar marker, the remedy is cultural, not corporate: reclaiming a day of gratitude from the marketplace and resisting the idea that federal timetables and big-box promotions should dictate our family life. The history of Black Friday is a cautionary tale about how fast commerce and political convenience can hollow out a tradition, and it should make anyone who cares about conserving American customs think twice about surrendering yet another sacred day to Washington and Wall Street.