The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to the post Thanksgiving holiday but to financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869.

The real history behind Black Friday is not as jolly as retailers might make it sound. Black Friday has been a nationwide holiday for decades. Many shoppers highly anticipate Black Friday to purchase gifts for the upcoming Christmas holiday.

While many people order online instead of in-person shopping, stores on Black Friday slash their prices to grasp peoples attention and draw them into stores. An NBC reporter mentions how Black Friday attracts people to stores. “Deals had to be worth jumping out of bed and running to the store for, and maybe even waiting in line for a while, too.”

In the late 1950s, the Philadelphia police force were tasked with being in charge of the Army-Navy football game held on the Saturday after Black Friday every year. While tourists began to flood into stores in the metropolitan area the police force had to work not only 12-16 hour shifts on Friday but also work overtime on Saturday to deal with the crowds and additional traffic.

By 1961, Philadelphia’s population had grown and Black Friday had become more popular. Local merchants and store-owners wanted to change the name of Black Friday to “Big Friday.” The news spread across the country too late, causing the name to remain the same.

How Black Friday impacts the Holiday shopping season?

The past few years, many stores have began to compete to see who could open their stores the earliest on Black Friday. Stores such as Walmart, Kohl’s, Best Buy, and Target all would open on Thanksgiving day and remain open all night for shoppers to start purchasing on Black Friday and receive the best deals.

This then turned Black Friday into a five-day weekend for shopping beginning on Thanksgiving and ending on Cyber Monday. Since most shoppers do more online shopping than in-store, they call this five-day shopping week “cyber five.” Shopping following “cyber five” in November would start being referred to as Black November.

Shoppers exclaim that they have taken advantage of the early deals stores offer. This helps shoppers to spread out their major purchases over several weeks and not do any “lumpy spending” or make concerned purchases during the holiday season.

This year on Black Friday shoppers spent a record high of $9.8 billion in U.S. online sales according to Adobe Analytics. Up 7.5% then last year, which had a high of $8.7 billion. Online sales have become more popular across the country.

As the graph shows, Cyber Monday sales have skyrocketed since 2014 as technology has became more advanced and more online sales have been offered.

Before the global pandemic of Covid-19, Black Friday was slowly changing from an in-person experience to becoming mostly online. In 2020, during the spike of Covid-19, Cyber Monday topped Black Friday as items ordered could simply be shipped to your house.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 people have began asking the question: “is in-person shopping on Black Friday beginning to decline?” Many experts say that although shoppers now do more online shopping, people who go to stores personally and do shopping could be known as following the tradition of the original Black Friday.

Although Black Friday has been an in-store experience, times have changed to online shopping and allow for Cyber Monday to strive.