UK shoppers are predicted to spend £6.4billion this Black Friday – £5billion during work hours – but where does that term come from? Let’s take a look at the history of the day
It’s the eve of Black Friday – and that means many people will be getting their hands on some absolute bargains just in time for Christmas.
It is believed that shoppers will collectively splash out £5billion during their work hours during the 24 hours of mega savings and sales. And it comes after Amazon issued a Black Friday warning over the 300million customers at risk of a cyber attack.
However, have you ever wondered where the name ‘Black Friday’ actually comes from. No? Well, we’re going to tell you anyway – it’s a good titbit to tell around the table.
We all know that the day of shopping frenzy originated in the US where just 24 hours after Thanksgiving – the day to show grace and gratefulness – people run around fighting over televisions.
Scenes of previous years have shown shoppers bundled outside shops to viciously race each other to snag a hugely reduced piece of technology or clothing.
According to one website that tracks Black Friday deaths, 17 people have been killed and 125 have been injured in relation the day of shopping since 2006.
But, let’s go back to the beginning first. It’s believed that the concept of Black Friday could date back as far as the late 1800s.
This is because traditional brick and mortar stores would introduce their holiday store sales the day after Thanksgiving parades.
It was a tactic to further entice people to visit shops and increase footfall in the local area. However, the real origin of the term ‘Black Friday’ was penned between the 1950s and 70s.
The moniker was first used by the Philadelphia police to describe the mayhem and disorder caused by the traffic and hoards of people arriving for the Army-Navy football game on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Officers found that most people would arrive on the Friday in between Thanksgiving and the weekend. This essentially created a massive headache for forces who had to deal with an unprecedented amount of people descending on the city.
The term ‘Black Friday’ essentially describes the dread of the police force. It’s a similar concept to how the 1987 stock market crash is often referred to ‘Black Monday’.
At the same time, store owners saw a huge surge in profits on this day in Philadelphia so also decided to pen the day ‘Black Friday’.
To make the day more palatable to the masses, national retailers decided to alter the origins of ‘Black Friday’ to pay homage to the term used when a company is making profit ‘in the black’.
This narrative was peddled nationally and holiday sales were then rolled out on huge scales from the 1980s. It was from here that the day we all know and love (dread) started to gain traction globally.
In the UK, it is believed that each person will spend an average £262 this Black Friday – which is up 13% from £232 per person in 2024. Accounting firm PwC predicts that UK consumers will spend £6.4billion on Black Friday, a 1.5% increase from last year.