Black Friday has in many ways almost become a holiday all of its own, but many may not know where the name “Black Friday” comes.
The origin of the term does come from all the business of the shopping that is done on the day after Thanksgiving, and is said to have been coined by The Philadelphia Police Department.
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Dating back to 1966, a stamp dealer named Earl Apfelbaum used the term in an ad and credited the city law enforcement for coming up with the name, which described all the chaos and traffic congestion that came along with the opening of the Christmas shopping season.
Throughout the years, retailers have felt that the term “Black Friday” was too negative as Black Monday was the name given to the day the Dow Jones historically plummeted in the ’80s and Black Thursday was the day the Great Depression started.
However, being in “the black” is a retail term that describes a business being profitable so eventually they came to embrace the term.
Unfortunately, many high-profile Black Fridays were notable because of the amount violence that people displayed at one another over buying items at stores, sometimes getting so bad that people were even shot and died.
According to The Balance, the most Black Fridays, over the years, have seemed to occur at Walmart.
Most stores have learned to handle the business as time has gone on, and there have been fewer reports of deadly violence on Black Friday in the last few years.
