Source: Wikipedia
Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): Guess I’ve been living under a rock all these years! Black Friday? I had never noticed this term, applied to the day after Thanksgiving shopping spree by Americans, until this year. Now EVERY reference to this shopping day includes the phrase “Black Friday”. I turned to Wikipedia to find out more about “Black Friday”, and sure enough, they had a nice overview of how the term came about. It even contained a reference to the first use of the term in print.
“The origin of the name is commonly believed to be tied to the fact that the heavy shopping day after Thanksgiving is when many retailers are thought to become profitable. Businesses once recorded losses in red ink and gains in black, a tradition that lives on in modern accounting software, hence the name. However, employees of retail stores have for years used the term in a satirical way, to note the extremely stressful and hectic nature of the day. The earliest recorded (modern) usage of the name suggests the latter as being closer to the true name origin:”
Read the entire entry on Wikipedia.com.