Who invented black friday

Before the retail industry put a tidy little spin on Black Friday, it had a much more sinister meaning. Black Friday had a similar connotation. The very earliest use of the phrase Black Friday dates to and had nothing to do with Christmas shopping.

It was the day plummeting gold prices caused a market crash , the effects of which were felt by the U. An archived excerpt of this ad appears in a thread on The Linguist List , an online forum operated by the Indiana University Department of Linguistics :. It is not a term of endearment to them. The late Joseph P. In , the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall.

Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulletin. These stores are often "in the black" profitable that day.

But the true story of Black Friday is darker. The term "Black Friday" was first used on Sept. In the s, Philadelphia police used the "Black Friday" term to refer to the day between Thanksgiving and the Army-Navy game.

Huge crowds of shoppers and tourists went to the city that Friday, and cops had to work long hours to cover the crowds and traffic. Merchants in the area tried to change the name to "Big Friday," but the alternative name never caught on.

By the late s, "Black Friday" had spread nationally with the more positive "red to black" backstory. Historically, black has been associated with days of economic stress as opposed to days of booming commercial success. The first Black Friday occurred in after financier Jay Gould and railway businessman James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, which ultimately resulted in financial panic and the collapse of the market.

A little over 60 years later, on October 29, , another stock market crash referred to as Black Tuesday marked the onset of the Great Depression. About 10 years later, Black Friday was used by Philadelphia traffic cops to describe the day after Thanksgiving because they had to work hour shifts in terrible traffic. Soon, the term caught on among shoppers and merchants in Philadelphia, and from there it took off nationwide.

The s brought the mythology of Black Friday as we know it today.