Black Friday is the Friday right after Thanksgiving, and it's become the unofficial starting gun for the holiday shopping season in the US. Deals open early, sell out fast, and disappear just as quickly — which is exactly why a reminder set a few days ahead is worth more than one set the morning of. Click the green Configure button and choose how far in advance you want to be alerted.
Why use a reminder for Black Friday?
- Deals move fast: Popular items routinely sell out within hours, sometimes minutes, of going live — knowing the date in advance gives you time to research what you actually want before the rush starts.
- Plan around the crowds (or avoid them entirely): If you're shopping in-store, knowing ahead means you can decide whether to go early or just stick to online deals from home.
- Budget properly: With nearly 1 in 4 shoppers spending $1,000 or more over the weekend, a heads-up gives you time to set a budget instead of impulse-buying.
- Catch it before Cyber Monday: Many of the biggest discounts of the year are split across Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday — a reminder for both means you don't have to choose blindly which day to shop.
Where did the name actually come from?
It's not the cheerful "stores finally turn a profit" story retailers like to tell. The term "Black Friday" was first used for the day after Thanksgiving back in 1951, when a trade magazine complained about factory workers calling in sick to stretch their holiday weekend. By the mid-1950s, Philadelphia police had picked up the term too — but for an entirely different reason: it described the chaos, traffic jams, and shoplifting that came with crowds of suburban shoppers and tourists flooding the city ahead of the annual Army-Navy football game. In 1961, city merchants tried rebranding it "Big Friday" to shake the negative reputation — it didn't catch on. The now-popular "stores go from red ink to black ink" explanation only started circulating in the 1980s, once retailers wanted a friendlier story to tell.
Just how big is it now?
In 2025, US shoppers spent a record $11.8 billion online on Black Friday alone, with global online spending hitting $79 billion in 24 hours. More than 87 million people shopped online that day, and between 10am and 2pm, shoppers were collectively spending over $12 million every minute, according to Adobe Analytics.
Worth knowing
Despite the name, most stores historically saw their biggest sales day of the year on the Saturday before Christmas, not Black Friday itself. And the term has a much older, darker meaning too — it was first used to describe the Panic of 1869, when two Wall Street financiers tried to corner the US gold market and crashed it instead.
So whether you're hunting for a specific deal or just want to know when the chaos officially kicks off, click that green Configure button and let Black Friday come to you on schedule.