How many days until Black Friday?

Black Friday takes place on the fourth Friday of November, the day after American Thanksgiving. Britain has no Thanksgiving, so the date arrived here stripped of any meaning beyond retail — largely through American-owned chains and online retailers from about 2010 onwards, and it took only a few years to become a fixture of the British shopping calendar.

What was originally a single day now stretches into a week or longer, with early deals in the middle of November and Cyber Monday bolted on at the far end. The early years produced genuine crushes in supermarket aisles; most of the activity has since moved online, where the pressure point is server capacity and courier networks rather than store doors.

Its position in the calendar is the whole point. Late November is far enough ahead of Christmas for delivery to be realistic, and close enough that a good proportion of what gets bought is destined to go under a tree. Retailers use it to clear stock before the December trading period, and it now marks the unofficial start of Christmas shopping in the UK.

Because the deals themselves are timed to specific hours, knowing the exact wait is more useful here than a rough count of days. The countdown resolves the fourth Friday for the year in question and runs to the midnight at which it begins.