The Witty, Mostly True, Tale of Black Friday 🖤
Once upon a time, in the land of Endless Capitalism, there lived a holiday called Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was a wholesome creature — full of gratitude, pumpkin pie, and passive-aggressive comments from relatives.
But Thanksgiving had a problem. 🚨
Right behind it waited its chaotic cousin: Black Friday 🖤, the holiday that shows up uninvited, drinks all the eggnog 🥛 and convinces normally sane adults to wrestle each other over televisions.
Origin Story: The Not-So-Dark Beginning 💰
The term “Black Friday” originally had nothing to do with shopping or doorbusters.
In the 19th century, it referred to a massive financial scandal 🤑 — two investors tried to corner the gold market 🪙, everything crashed spectacularly, and the whole day went down in history as a financial faceplant worthy of a montage 💸.
Fast-forward to the 1950s 🛒
Philadelphia police officers started calling the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday because hordes of shoppers and tourists swarmed the city before the Army-Navy football game. There were traffic jams, cranky cops, and enough chaos to make a toddler’s birthday party look organized.
Retailers, realizing the name was catching on and also wanting to sound less like a doom-metal band, spun the story:
“No no, it’s because our accounting books go from red to black — as in profit!” 💸 💸 💸
A clever rebrand. And thus, Black Friday was reborn as an annual gladiator event of consumerism.
Enter the Modern Era 💻
Today, Black Friday has evolved into a week-long, month-long, eternal shopping event that begins sometime around July if you’re on Amazon.
People still line up at dawn. Deals still appear. Someone somewhere still physically fights over a discounted air fryer. Tradition lives on.
Moral of the Story 📖
Black Friday started as a financial catastrophe, became a police headache, was rebranded into an accounting fairy tale, and ultimately turned into the Olympics of bargain hunting.
A beautiful, chaotic, entirely American evolution.