Black Friday History: How Online Sales Killed the Queue

The most repeated explanation for “Black Friday” says retailers spent most of the year “in the red” and finally turned a profit “in the black” on the day after Thanksgiving. It’s a clean, positive, commercial story. It is also not the original explanation.

The phrase’s shopping-related history is tied to Philadelphia. Every year, the Friday after Thanksgiving brought enormous crowds into the city for holiday shopping and tourism — compounded by the annual Army–Navy football game held that same weekend. For Philadelphia police, that Friday meant traffic jams, packed sidewalks, crowded shops, long shifts and shoplifting. Officers began using an unflattering nickname for the day: Black Friday. The name described chaos, not profits.

Philadelphia merchants weren’t thrilled that the city’s biggest shopping day carried a name associated with police headaches. In 1961, an attempt was made to promote a friendlier alternative: “Big Friday.” It didn’t work. Consumers and local usage stuck with “Black Friday” regardless of what retailers preferred to call it — a reminder that branding isn’t always created in a boardroom.

Even before “Black Friday” became a nationally recognized phrase, retailers understood that Thanksgiving was the unofficial gateway to Christmas shopping. That created a strange problem in 1939: during the Great Depression, Thanksgiving fell unusually late in November, and retailers worried the Christmas shopping season would be too short. President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier. The decision was controversial enough that critics nicknamed the altered holiday “Franksgiving,” and different U.S. states initially observed Thanksgiving on different dates — a genuine headache for anyone trying to run a national retail promotion around two competing Thanksgivings.

Congress settled the question in 1941, fixing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November. That gave the retail calendar a predictable anchor: Thanksgiving, then Friday, then the countdown to Christmas.

Through the 1980s, the phrase spread nationally as retailers, newspapers and television embraced it — and popularized the friendlier “red to black” profit story alongside it. One tactic became legendary: the doorbuster, a product priced aggressively low and available only in limited quantities, designed purely to pull people through the door so they’d buy more once inside. A TV normally priced at $499 might drop to $199 for a run of just 20 units, with 300 people waiting outside — the product was the bait, and the crowd was the business model.

By the 1990s, Black Friday had become a full ritual. Families planned driving routes between stores by opening time — Store A at 5 a.m., Store B at 6, the mall at 7 — racing distance and inventory rather than clicking fastest. Newspapers published massive advertising inserts; shoppers circled deals with pens. The competition wasn’t speed of a click. It was speed of a car.

At first, online shopping seemed almost unrelated to Black Friday. Connections were slow, retail websites were primitive, and many consumers were wary of entering credit card details online. Physical stores kept one enormous advantage: you could take the product home immediately. But as the commercial web expanded through the 1990s and broadband spread in the early 2000s, consumers grew comfortable buying books, electronics and eventually almost everything online. Black Friday now effectively had two stores: the physical one, and the website — and price comparison, once a matter of driving between locations, became a matter of opening browser tabs.

Retailers noticed something specific: online sales jumped on the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend. At the time, many consumers had better internet connections at work than at home, so they shopped once back at their desks. The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org popularized a name for the phenomenon in 2005: Cyber Monday. The shopping calendar now read Thanksgiving, Black Friday, weekend, Cyber Monday — physical retail with a digital sibling. That clean division would not survive the next decade.

The smartphone, arriving from 2007, changed shopping again: the internet was no longer confined to home or office, it was in every shopper’s pocket. A customer standing in a store aisle could now scan a product, search a competitor’s price, read reviews and order elsewhere — a behavior retailers came to call showrooming. The store shelf was no longer competing only with the store across the street; it was competing with the entire internet.

Meanwhile, physical retailers escalated their own competition. Opening times crept earlier — 6 a.m., 5 a.m., 4 a.m., midnight, and eventually Thanksgiving evening itself — on the logic that whichever store opened first captured the shopper’s wallet first. That escalation had a dark side. In 2008, a temporary worker was killed at a Walmart on Long Island, New York, when shoppers surged through the entrance at opening. Other Black Friday events over the years produced reports of fights, injuries and disputes over limited merchandise. The image of Black Friday began to shift from shopping excitement toward crowd risk — and online shopping offered an alternative with no doors, no stampede and no parking lot.

The pandemic turned crowding from a nuisance into a genuine health risk. Retailers reduced Thanksgiving-evening openings and spread deals across days and weeks instead of concentrating them on one morning. Consumers embraced online ordering, contactless payments, home delivery and curbside pickup — buy online, pick up in store — at a scale that made a retail transition already underway suddenly accelerate. Crucially, this didn’t necessarily kill the store: it changed what the store did, turning it into a local fulfilment hub where an employee picks the order and the customer’s car does the last few feet. Black Friday became omnichannel — research online, visit a store, scan a product, order through an app, collect it curbside — with no single channel getting sole credit for the sale.

NRF’s Thanksgiving-weekend surveys show online shoppers consistently outnumbering in-store shoppers on Black Friday since at least 2022 — but the two figures have stayed close enough that “e-commerce killed the store” is the wrong conclusion. The more accurate read: e-commerce killed the requirement to queue, not the store visit itself.

The device driving most of this isn’t the computer — it’s the phone. In 2024, mobile devices accounted for 54.5% of U.S. online holiday transactions, the first time smartphones took the majority at this scale; by the 2025 season that mobile share rose to 56.4%. The phone is what lets Black Friday happen on the sofa, at dinner, in the car, or while standing in an actual physical Black Friday queue — checking a competitor’s price on the same device used to stand in line.

The newest disruption to the shopping hunt is generative AI. Consumers increasingly use AI tools to research products, compare choices, understand specifications and narrow shopping lists before ever visiting a retailer’s site. During the 2025 U.S. holiday season, traffic reaching retail sites from generative-AI tools rose 693.4% year over year — from a base that Adobe’s own reporting notes remains relatively small in absolute terms, but the direction is striking. The next Black Friday shift may not be store versus website; it may be search box versus AI shopping assistant, delegating “find the deal” to software instead of a human doing the hunting.