Believe it or not, Black Friday was not a holiday invented by retailers to encourage consumers to spend more. The day after Thanksgiving being referred to as “Black Friday” began in the 1950s, and it initially referred to the practice of workers calling out sick on that Friday - completely unrelated to shopping! By the 1980s, stores had adopted a new meaning. “Black Friday” has come to mean, for them, the beginning of the period of the year where they enter into “the black” and generate profits for the year.