Black Friday

In the early 1960s, Philadelphia police used the phrase, and it was not a cheerful one. The day after Thanksgiving, shoppers and tourists flooded downtown, causing awful traffic jams and a wave of incidents. For officers, it was a grim, exhausting day with no breaks, so they called it "Black Friday."

Merchants then gave that gloomy name a much more appealing story. In the old days, bookkeepers wrote losses in red ink and profits in black ink. Stores that had struggled all year were said to swing into the black on this day, so they spun the name into a positive symbol with the story of a ledger turning from red to black. In reality, most stores don't turn a profit for the first time on this day, and this explanation spread later than the police origin.

So a day that was a headache for the police has been completely reborn as a festival that shoppers and merchants all over the world look forward to.

To be more precise, behind those jaw-dropping markdowns is some careful retail math. The key goal is to draw in lots of shoppers early in the holiday season and win over customers' wallets before competitors do.

So stores put loss leaders front and center: items priced near cost, or sometimes even below it. They stock a small number of TVs or appliances at unbelievable prices to stop people in their tracks. Shoppers come in for a TV and end up filling their carts with household goods and clothes, too.

Also, a lot of the discounted merchandise is bought ahead of time or made specially for the event, and clearing out leftover inventory is just one of several reasons. In the end, it's a strategy to make up for the losses on bait items with sales of other products, growing total sales and profit.

Black Friday used to be famous for people pitching tents outside stores before dawn, waiting in line, and sprinting inside when the doors opened. People even shoved each other to grab the hottest items first. But as online shopping became part of everyday life, that scene moved onto smartphone screens.

Now the event flows into Cyber Monday, which centers on online stores, not just brick-and-mortar shops. It's no longer a single-day flash sale. It has stretched into a long holiday shopping season that runs from early November through Christmas in December.

Today, many countries around the world, including South Korea, run their own big sales or target shoppers who buy from overseas sites, which has turned Black Friday into a global shopping phenomenon that crosses borders.