Today, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sit at the center of American consumer culture, days of midnight lines, digital countdown timers, and a frenzy of sales that ripple across the world. But behind the doorbusters and online flash deals lies a history far more complicated, shaped by economic desperation, calculated marketing, and decades of human cost. These shopping events did not start as celebrations of abundance. Their origins are far darker, tied to traffic gridlock, exhausted workers, and the pressures of a growing retail machine.
Black Friday’s earliest roots stretch back to Philadelphia in the 1950s. Local police coined the term to describe the chaos that unfolded every year after Thanksgiving, when shoppers flooded downtown streets and suburban families streamed in for the Army–Navy football game. Traffic stalled for hours. Stores were overwhelmed. Officers pulled double shifts to manage accidents, thefts, and altercations. To police and retail workers, “Black Friday” referred not to profit but to the most dreaded day of the year.
Retailers hated the name at first, calling it bad for business. Some attempted to rebrand the day as “Big Friday,” but the public never embraced it. What they couldn’t ignore, however, was the massive number of shoppers arriving whether stores wanted them or not. The crowds kept coming. They grew larger with every passing year. By the late 1970s, national chains realized they could turn the chaos into profit by leaning into the frenzy — offering early sales, extended hours, and loss-leader deals that lured customers in before Christmas.
By the 1980s, Black Friday had been transformed. Retail executives crafted a new origin story, claiming that the name referred to the moment stores “went into the black” financially. It was clever marketing, a way to bury the day’s chaotic history under a clean, financial metaphor. Shoppers believed it. The media repeated it. And for retailers, the shift marked the moment the holiday shopping season became operationalized: planned months in advance, engineered for maximum turnout, and capable of reshaping the entire retail calendar.
The human impact grew, too. As big-box stores multiplied in the 1990s and early 2000s, Black Friday began at dawn. Then 5 a.m. Then 3 a.m. Retail workers were pressured into overnight shifts, sometimes after spending Thanksgiving with family only to rush immediately back to the sales floor. Injuries spiked. Fights became common enough that local police departments started preparing for Black Friday like a sport event. In 2008, a Walmart employee in New York was trampled to death when crowds forced their way through the doors, a tragedy that revealed the darker side of a retail system built on urgency and scarcity tactics.
Cyber Monday emerged later, born not from crowds but from surveillance of digital behavior. In the mid-2000s, online retailers noticed a spike in sales the Monday after Thanksgiving. It wasn’t spontaneous, millions of people returned to work after the holiday and used high-speed office internet to shop. Marketing teams seized on the trend immediately, naming it “Cyber Monday” and transforming an organic pattern into a coordinated, international sales event. The pressure merely shifted platforms. Instead of stampedes, shoppers faced algorithmic scarcity: timers, limited stock counters, and price manipulation designed to trigger impulse purchases.
Cyber Monday’s dark side comes from the invisible infrastructure supporting it. Warehouse workers across the country reported brutal schedules, 12-hour shifts, mandatory overtime, and near-constant monitoring through wearable trackers. Delivery drivers faced impossible routes with holiday deadlines, leading to accidents and burnout. For many logistics companies, Cyber Monday was not a day of celebration but of survival.
As both events grew, the holiday season’s psychological cost also became clear. Shoppers reported rising anxiety tied to the fear of missing deals, social pressure to buy gifts, and financial strain from trying to stretch budgets around limited-time sales. Studies showed that impulse buying and buyer’s remorse spiked during these events, driven by engineered urgency and retail psychology. In many ways, Black Friday and Cyber Monday became reflections of modern capitalism: high-pressure, high-speed, and optimized for extraction rather than joy.
Yet despite the dark origins and ongoing criticisms, both days endure, not because consumers love the chaos, but because the sales ecosystem has become unavoidable. Retailers front-load their annual revenue expectations into these dates. Brands build entire marketing strategies around them. Shoppers, aware of post-pandemic inflation and rising costs, often feel compelled to participate for fear of paying more later.
The history of Black Friday and Cyber Monday reveals a truth often hidden beneath the glitter of holiday decor: these events were never designed for comfort or celebration. They were born from disorder, shaped by pressure, and refined by decades of marketing into rituals of urgency. For many, the deals are a relief in tough economic times. For others, they are reminders of the invisible systems, from overworked retail employees to warehouse laborers, that make those deals possible.
Black Friday began in chaos. Cyber Monday began in surveillance. And together, they mark the beginning of a season defined as much by pressure as by celebration.
Editor’s Note: This article draws from retail history, labor reports, and economic analyses. Some narrative elements about shopper behavior and worker experiences are presented as a composite to reflect the broader pattern across decades.
Sources & Further Reading:
– National Retail Federation historical sales records
– Philadelphia police archives on early “Black Friday” usage (1950s–1960s)
– Labor Department reports on holiday retail working conditions
– Retail marketing analyses on the creation of Cyber Monday
– Investigative reporting from The New York Times, Vox, and AP on retail labor impacts
(One of many stories shared by Headcount Coffee — where mystery, history, and late-night reading meet.)
