Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, often regarded the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

In recent years, major retailers have opened extremely early and offered promotional sales to kick the holiday shopping season, similar Boxing Day sales in many Commonwealth Nations. Black Friday is an official holiday, but many non-retail employees and schools both Thanksgiving and the day after off, followed by a weekend, increasing the number of potential shoppers. It routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005, although news reports, which that time were inaccurate, have described it the busiest shopping day of the year for a longer period of time.

The day’s name originated in Philadelphia, it originally was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which occur on the day after Thanksgiving. Use of the term started before 1961 and began to see broader use outside Philadelphia around 1975. Later an alternative explanation began to offered: that « Black Friday » indicates the point which retailers begin to turn a profit, or are «  the black ».

For many years, it was common for retailers to open at 6:00 a.m., in the late 2000s many had crept 5:00 or even 4:00. This was taken a new extreme in 2011, several retailers opened at midnight the first time. In 2012, Walmart and several other retailers announced that they would open of their stores at 8:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day (except in states where opening on Thanksgiving prohibited, such as Massachusetts, where they still opened around midnight), prompting calls for a walkout some workers. Black Friday shopping is known attracting aggressive crowds, annual reports of assaults, shootings, and throngs of people trampling on other shoppers an attempt to get the best deal on a product before supplies run .