Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
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?
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...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Doing a simple Google search 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.
God, root, what is difference ?
Yeah, that knowledgable person just entered your card information in the same form that you wouldn't use...
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.
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.
Tom Geller
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.
But why is the rum gone?