According to some reports, the term “Black Friday” was first used by Philadelphia police in the 1960s to describe the traffic and large crowds of holiday shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving. However, it was not until the 1980s that “Black Friday” spread across the United States, and the term came to mark the point when stores moved “into the black,” or became profitable. (Some retailers objected to the name, but attempts to have it called “Big Friday” were unsuccessful.) Black Friday became a global shopping event the following decade.
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