When is Black Friday 2025? Traditions, meaning behind holiday, and more explored
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LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 24: A woman walks past a Black Friday sale sign on Oxford Street on November 24, 2017 in London, England. British retailers offer deals on their products as part of the annual pre-Christmas Black Friday shopping event, held this year on November 24. (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)Friday 2025 lands on November 28, a date most people flag as the opening shot of the holiday‑shopping bonanza. What started decades ago as a post‑Thanksgiving dash in the United States has swelled into a sprawling spectacle that melds discounts, overnight queues and lightning‑fast online flash sales.
The moniker "The Days" was originally glued to the snarling traffic of 1950s Philadelphia. Retailers later seized it as the instant they finally crossed the profitability threshold, flipping deficits into verdant‑ink gains. As the decades passed, Black Friday shed its bargain‑hunter reputation. Now serves as a rite that subtly steers the tempo of consumer spending as the calendar year draws to a close.
Black Friday's rise from post-holiday chaos to global shopping phenomenon
Black Friday marked each year on the Monday after Thanksgiving, in the United States has shed its post‑holiday discount vibe and turned into a global retail extravaganza. What started as a handful of price cuts now reaches over fifty nations and countless online storefronts, morphing the day into a shopping marathon.
Celebrated for blowing sales records and slashing prices across a spread that includes cutting‑edge tech, runway‑ready fashion and home goods the event now officially heralds the start of the holiday shopping season. In 2025, Black Friday lands on November 28 tucked neatly between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, forging an elongated sales corridor that stands out as one of the year's shopping windows. This drawn‑out consumer frenzy forms a linchpin for brands delivering a slice of their revenue.
Before the term "Black Friday" was linked to slumps, but over the decades it shed that baggage and morphed into one of the year's biggest shopping spectacles. Its retail pedigree actually dates back to Philadelphia in the 1950s and '60s, when police officers began using the phrase to describe the crowds and traffic snarls that followed Thanksgiving.
What started as a nightmare for law enforcement eventually blossomed into a marketing bonanza. By the 1980s, merchants had begun to label "Black Friday" as the moment their ledgers turned from red to black, when the ink shifted from loss to profit. When online shopping took off in the 2000s and sites like Amazon opened the market to shoppers, that once‑local event blossomed into a buying frenzy, effectively signalling the unofficial kickoff of the holiday season.
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TOPICS: Black Friday