Black Friday Countdown

How the date is determined

The calculation is simple but two-step:

1. Find US Thanksgiving — the fourth Thursday of November (federal law, 1941).
2. Add one day — Black Friday is always the Friday immediately following.

The earliest Black Friday can fall is November 23 (when November 1 is a Thursday). The latest is November 29 (when November 1 is a Friday). Canada and the rest of the world that observes Black Friday simply uses the same US date, even though they don't celebrate American Thanksgiving.

Upcoming Black Friday and Thanksgiving dates

Where the name actually came from

The popular “retailers go from red ink to black ink” story is a retroactive marketing explanation popularized in the 1980s. The actual origin is much less flattering:

The term was used by Philadelphia police, bus drivers, and traffic officers in the late 1950s and 1960s to describe the misery of the day after Thanksgiving. Suburban shoppers flooded the city to start Christmas shopping, traffic snarled, sidewalks overflowed, and shoplifting spiked. The Army-Navy football game played the following Saturday in Philadelphia compounded the crowds. Police were required to work 12-hour shifts and couldn't take days off — hence “Black Friday.”

The earliest documented print use appeared in a 1961 public relations newsletter Public Relations News warning Philadelphia retailers about the negative connotation. By the 1980s retailers had successfully rebranded the term using the accounting-ink explanation, and the original Philadelphia traffic origin was largely forgotten outside historians.

Franksgiving: why Thanksgiving's date matters

Black Friday's date depends entirely on Thanksgiving's. From 1863 to 1939, Thanksgiving was observed on the last Thursday of November by tradition rather than law. In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it to the second-to-last Thursday to extend the holiday shopping season during the Great Depression — a politically disastrous decision nicknamed “Franksgiving.”

States split: 23 followed the new date, 22 kept the old one, and Texas and Colorado observed both. Three years of confusion later, Congress passed a joint resolution in December 1941 fixing Thanksgiving permanently as the fourth Thursday of November (not the last, which can sometimes be the fifth Thursday). FDR signed it into law and Black Friday has followed that date ever since.

Black Friday as a retail event

The transformation from "Philadelphia traffic problem" to "biggest shopping day of the year" took roughly 25 years:

• 1960s–1970s: Term mostly negative, used regionally in Philadelphia and a few other cities.
• 1980s: Retailers nationwide adopted the term with the new positive “in the black” narrative. Stores began offering doorbuster deals and opening early.
• 2000s: Stores started opening at 4–5 AM on Friday, then earlier each year — eventually creeping into Thanksgiving evening (controversial enough that some states still ban Thanksgiving retail openings).
• 2005: “Cyber Monday” coined by the National Retail Federation's Shop.org to capture the Monday-after-Thanksgiving online surge.
• 2010s: Online sales overtake in-store, and the “Black Friday” window stretches to a week or more.
• 2020s: The day still posts record sales totals but no longer dominates the shopping calendar the way it did in the doorbuster era; Amazon's October “Prime Big Deal Days” and continuous discounting have spread holiday shopping across the entire fall.

Sources & references

• National Retail Federation — Black Friday data and surveys — the industry source for shopper counts and spending totals.
• US Census Bureau — Monthly Retail Trade Survey — official US government retail sales figures including November and December comparisons.
• US National Archives — Thanksgiving Proclamation — the 1941 joint resolution that fixed Thanksgiving's date and, by extension, Black Friday's.