Cyber Monday Doesn't Exist

xsspd2004 writes "Despite a huge amount of hype, the Monday after Thanksgiving is historically only the 12th-biggest online shopping day of the year. Do a Google search on "Cyber Monday," and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago."

greeting card strategem

[know1]

this will be just like when they tried to add grandma and grandadas days to mothers and fathers days, just another excuse to try and drum up more profit. seems a bit pointless in this case though, they are both wrong and it's a growth business anyway. perhaps marketing were exceptionally bored. or maybe it was the work experience guy

No.

[CyricZ]

The Google search they performed has nothing to do with indicating the quantity of sales. They don't even claim that it does! They use the search more to show how quickly the new term "Cyber Monday" has spread.

If you had bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that the sales data is based on non-Google research.

For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist!

[pla]

Black Friday exists because physical shopping at a Brick-n'-Mortar has a number of very real constraints on when it can occur - You need the store open and staffed; You need to have free time (ie, not at work) to go; You need a reason to go; You need money to spend there.

Most people meeting the last condition have the Friday after Turkey-day off from work, thus meeting the second condition. Most retail sales staff do not, thus meeting the first condition. And our annual Materialism-and-oh-yeah-that-dead-Jew festival provides the final condition, a reason to go shopping in the first place.


Shopping on-line changes all that. The store always has its virtual doors open. They always have what you want, even if you don't know you want something. You can even find things on the cheap, if you look around carefully. It eliminates three of the four constraints necessary for a "holiday" flood of shoppers to occur on a particular day. And for the only one remaining, we still have at least another 20 or so "shopping" days up to which Amazon will guarantee delivery by December 25th. So no rush.


The entire premise of a mad rush to shop on one particular day comes from the same minds that can't understand why we "abandon" 90% of shopping carts at online stores, after they force us to add items to a cart to see its price.

Nothing to see here, move along - Captain Obvious has struck again.

Oh, just wait...

[greg_barton]

A few more years of this hype and it may well exist. Just wait.

The interesting question is, "Why the hype?" Or, more specifically, "Why do some people want it to exist?"

A related question is, "How can the entire media be manipulated to hype something that doesn't really exist?" Sounds *cough*WMD*cough* familiar, doesn't it?

Re:For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist!

[kria]

In addition, of course, most stores have huge sales on that Friday. It would be interesting to see the order that all this occured in, but I suspect that the sales just made a fairly popular shopping day into a very popular one.

Of course, even Black Friday is only the Fifth Largest Shopping Day [snopes.com] of the year. Apparently weekends leading up to Christmas are bigger, and I suspect that peaks in online shopping will occur based on when things can be shipped to get to people in time for Christmas. This year, with Christmas on a Sunday, I suspect that Christmas Eve will be an astounding shopping day.

Lemmings to the Internet

[Billosaur]

Of course Cyber Monday doesn't exist, by way of the fact that you can shop at most e-tailers at any time, any day, and with advances in shipping, you can shop and get things delivered to you right up to Christmas day in most cases.

Of course some marketing person thought this up -- they thought up New Coke didn't they?

From Business Week: That's not to suggest that the Cyber Monday boost is a total fabrication. The fact is, people do most of their online shopping at work -- 58% of them, according to comScore Networks. They often get started in earnest on Mondays, when they return from a frustrating weekend at the mall to their broadband connections at work.

The fact is, many of us are smart enough not to buy into the hype of Black Friday, let alone Cyber Monday. I can shop online any time, from work, from home. It's easier to do from work because there's little chance of someone discovering what you're buying. Mind you, you have to be careful and actually work occasionally...

779,000 results? more like 300.

[Sam H]

Doing a simple Google search [google.com] I get "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 283 already displayed." although more than 1,000,000 pages were indexed. (YMMV, all Google frontends don't yield the same results, especially with newly coined terms). This simply means that hundreds of useless blogs or news sites use the phrase on hundreds of their pages, and that those pages are accessible through hundreds of different URLs. Typical Google pollution.

Re:Are you trying to say...

[MCraigW]

Walmart's credit card screen wasn't encrypted so I canceled out. Called customer service and not only did I get a real, well spoken, knowledgeable person in under a minute, but they pulled up exactly what I had tried to buy, took my card information, and got my unit shipped

Yeah, that knowledgable person just entered your card information in the same form that you wouldn't use...

Re:For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist!

[pla]

However, Christian or not, it would be nice if you showed a little more respect

For the most part, I do respect people's religious beliefs. I will, to my dying death, argue in support of your right to believe in anything that makes you feel better about your relation to Life, The Universe, and Everything. So long as it doesn't directly affect me; for example if your beliefs tell you to blow me up, you have lost any claim on my "respect".

I won't, however, humor you about your particular choice of imaginary friend. I don't humor parents who lie to their kids about Santa and the Eostre Bunny, either (I don't go out of my way to disillusion them, but asking me a direct question such as "so what time do you think Santa visited last night" for the amusement of the wee ones will not have a good outcome). And I'll damn sure put my foot down when it comes to indoctrinating kids with FSM-worthy nonsense in direct contradiction with demonstrable facts.


Personally, I do believe in a creator deity, but I don't have the impudence (or ignorance) to claim I can ever "know" anything about that deity... Beyond the mere fact that I exist, or more accurately, that existance itself exists.

Now, if you happen to consider yourself a Christian, then you should feel offended by what I wrote. But not because of how I wrote it, rather, because I described the sad reality of your biggest religious festival. The material world has taken what should count as a joyous celebration of the birth of the son of your bhakti's god (time shifted to match the winter solstice, no doubt out of "respect" for those religions that held that as a holy day), and turned it into a day of worship of the jolly fat consumer of Coca Cola.

"Ford be praised!"

Re:Are you trying to say...

[ortholattice]

Probably more likely is that the form target is https, just not the page the form comes from. This would be fine, and is smart design

How am I supposed to know that the form target is https? Am I supposed to analyze the page source code before I click "buy" with my credit card number? Your browser might warn you, and give you a chance to opt-out, if a form submission leaves https mode, but the other way around you can only know, practically speaking, after it's too late.

Of course I could set the browser to warn about all non-encrypted submissions (as some do until by default you turn it off). But that would be extremely annoying for ordinary non-senstive information submission, like posting to a forum, so most people turn it off, a quite reasonable thing to do once you're aware of that.

Sorry, this would not get my vote as a "smart design". My conservative assumption is that submission from a non-encrypted page will be non-encrypted unless I have good evidence otherwise.

"Only" the twelfth?

[tgeller]

The story implies that being the twelfth-biggest shopping day is some pathetic underachievement. But consider: That means it's in the 96th percentile! I'd say that's significant, especially if (as the article implies) shopping then falls off for the next week, i.e. until 5 December.

Hype

[fdiskne1]

Just one more thing that demonstrates the reason I ignore the mainstream media. I refuse to believe any hype. As soon as I hear about anything "new and wonderful" I look into what makes it new and what makes it wonderful. When I first heard the term "cyber Monday", I thought to myself, "That's a bunch of bull. It's all just media hype." I was proved correct. I'm tired of all the media hype. Like NBC's Today show having the woman in a canoe to report on all the flooding, only to have a couple of guys walk through the few-inch deep water in front of her. Like the guy reporting on a hurricane a couple of years ago, struggling to stay in front of the camera despite the ferocious winds, only to have someone walk behind him, looking at him funny like "Why are you acting like the wind is blowing that hard?" Don't believe what the media tells you. All they want is to have more viewers for their commercials so they can make more money. What a bunch of crap.

--Okay, you can now mod this -1 Obvious.