Infamous for its flashy ads, deep discounts and deal-driven brawls in malls, Black Friday has become a popular shopping holiday – but how did this sales bonanza get its name?

You may have heard that the name refers to a welcome increase in sales for retailers, who go from operating at a loss or “in the red” to making a profit “in the black” the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers flood in. stores to give discounts once a year.

But that story is at least partly a myth that obscures a somewhat darker episode in the history of holiday shopping, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and historians.

In the 1960s, police officers in Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued the day after Thanksgiving, when crowds of shoppers from nearby suburbs and tourists flooded the city ahead of the annual Army-Navy football game held on Saturday .

The city’s police were not allowed to apply for leave and had to work extra long shifts to accommodate the endless stream of visitors.

Some took advantage of the holiday rush and pocketed merchandise, making it a notorious shoplifting day – and a huge headache for police officers.

The police term “Black Friday” spread like wildfire throughout the city, and Philadelphia retailers moved quickly to try to quell it by promoting the shopping spree as “Big Friday,” but it didn’t stick around.

By the late 1980s, retailers had managed to rebrand the shoplifting nightmare by presenting it as a big sale using the “red-black” profit statement.

Since then, the term has stuck and Black Friday has grown into a major shopping holiday. Other big sale days, like Cyber ​​Monday and Small Business Saturday, have popped up along the way.

Major retailers like Amazon and Target created their own e-commerce and brick-and-mortar discount weeks in October to try to capture their last big sales wave before Thanksgiving weekend.