Black Friday is the name given for the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States. Many stores offer highly promoted sales and open very early, sometimes as early as midnight, or even sometime on Thanksgiving Day. Black Friday has been regularly the busiest shopping day of the year in the U.S. since 2005. It is also a shopping holiday globally. The earliest use of the phrase Black Friday referring to the day after Thanksgiving started in Philadelphia, back in 1961, where it was used by police to describe the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic that would occur on that day. One theory on why the name Black Friday stuck and others didn’t is that most retailers operated at a financial loss for most of the year and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning after Thanksgiving. When this was recorded in the financial records, a common accounting practice was to use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive. Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be “in the red ”, instead of taking in the year’s profits. For nearly the last two decades, Black Friday has been a net positive for businesses and commerce, but that is slowly coming to an end. With online shopping on the rise more and more people are forgoing the need to participate in this chaotic and sometimes dangerous “holiday.” Many people are ordering all of their presents and Christmas needs online.