Editor’s note: “Behind the News” is the product of Sun staff assisted by the Sun’s AI lab, which includes a variety of tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI, Google Gemini and ChatGPT.

The term “Black Friday” originated in the 1950s in Philadelphia, where it referred to the chaotic convergence of shoppers and tourists crowding the city for post-Thanksgiving sales and the annual Army-Navy college football game. The intense influx overwhelmed police and created traffic jams, giving the day a negative connotation. By the 1960s, merchants tried to rebrand it as “Big Friday” but the chaos-driven name stuck. [1][2][3]

By the 1980s, retailers transformed Black Friday into a positive celebration by associating “black” with profitability — moving from loss (red ink) to profit (black ink

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