How did Singles Day Overtake Black Friday?
Coming from the United States, you grow up hearing about the mad rush that Black Fridays can entail. Eager shoppers camping out in Best Buy parking lots for the latest Xbox. Fights braking out over merchandise. And even people being trampled by out-of-control mobs stampeding an open door. It’s gained enough cultural notoriety that Comedy Central’s South Park even devoted an entire movielength satire to Black Friday. Being the Friday day after Thanksgiving, the day is not recognized as an official holiday in the U.S., but is often included in the time off allowed for the Thanksgiving holiday. Since at least the 1930’s, this day has been associated with the beginning of the North American Christmas shopping season. However, it
wasn’t until the 80’s that the phenomenon became widely known as Black Friday and slowly spread out to Canada, the U.K., and now even India. In the last 10 years, total spending during Black Friday has nearly doubled. However, in a strange turn, 2014 saw the first decrease from the previous year. It happened again this year, falling from US$11.6 billion to US$10.4 billion in physical locations. Meanwhile, those now-infamous tales of parking lot campers and store riots may slowly becoming things of the past as more Americans pursue their shopping deals online. Unlike physical sales, which declined by US$1.2 billion this year, online sales rose by 14% to US$2.72 billion. Combined, both physical and online sales totaled $13.2 billion for 2015. However, another event is also increasing sales into the online realm, and it blows the United States’ Black Friday away: Singles’ Day. I encountered Singles’ Day in China for the first time this year and the fanaticism involved may have been just as intense as some of those tales from America, but in a wholly different arena. People up at the wee hours of the night in order to secure the best deals on the online products they wanted. Stressing out when everything they wanted was disappearing from their screens. And, those individuals becoming enraged by the friends designating one buyer for them all. Singles’ Day as a commercial holiday is a comparably recent event, beginning with its appropriation by Alibaba Group in 2009. Before that, it was a minor day used as an antithesis to Valentine’s Day, as 11/11 is said to be visually reminiscent of four lonely individuals. Alibaba turned this minor happening into not only the biggest commercial celebration in China, but in the world, in only a few years. In 2014, total sales for the day were just over US$9 billion, significant, but still under America’s Black Friday sales. However, this year, the sales of Alibaba alone surpassed all of America’s Black Friday sales, with Black Friday totaling US$13.2 billion and Singles’ Day bringing in US$14.32 billion in a single day. This now makes China’s Singles’ Day 2015 the single largest day of consumer spending on record.
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