The phrase Black Friday originally referred to a stock market crash. (Also Black Monday, so I guess Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to invest). In the U.S. it has recently been applied to the shopping day after Thanksgiving, which is undoubtedly the biggest retail day of the year. The meaning is it's the day stores go into the black financially.

Also a good song by Steely Dan. (Whose name is another reference).


>>So now we know when we went “commercial” and the importance of Thanksgiving. Now about so called “Black Friday”? That term seems to have begun in the 1970’s. How many people stood outside of a store at 4 AM to “enjoy the specials of the day”? I like to avoid all crowds and stay from shopping malls this time of the year! :)
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>Scratching my head now... because I think I've heard of the term "black friday" back home (days of the week are not persons, places nor people in Serbian, hence lowercase) when I was a kid, which would date it into early sixties. And the meaning was not what you'd expect - our accountants don't tell you you've gone into red, they say you've gone into minus. So the red/black doesn't work there, but "rolled into black" is a well known expression (meaning the mourning, for wearing all black), so black friday is your worst day, the day when your life takes an ugly turn for the worse. "Your black friday has arrived" is nothing less than "you're doomed".
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>I figure the expression goes straight into false friends page: http://www.ndragan.com/lange/zigzag.html (just read the 1st and 4th column, you'll get the idea).