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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."
If it was created only a week ago, I somehow doubt that google has spidered and indexed ~800k sites/pages containing such phrase, in that time period.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Sounds a lot like the "baby train" and "birthrate peak nine months after the 1965 Northeast US blackout" myths. Only less entertaining.
Someone said, "Gee, I betcha there's a lot of online shopping when people get back to work and their high-speed internet connections" and the plausible and amusing speculation became a legend.
I actually was skeptical about this, because most e-commerce sites are quite usable even at dialup speeds, and, conversely, DSL and cable are far from rare.
It's not like the days when people had 28Kbps modems at home and T1s at work.
It would be very interesting if someone actually managed to track the "Cyber Monday" meme to its source. It might be possible, since it originated recently and probably spread mostly via the Internet.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'm sure you already know that the reason it's called "Black Friday" is because it's the time of year when retailers finally move out of the red and into the profitable black column on their balance sheets
Although this doesn't apply to privately held stores, at least any corporate retail chains have to report their earnings quarterly. And any non-R&D company that reported three out of four quarters in the red would find itself trading as penny stocks within just a few cycles of that.
Not to say that such a claim counts as entirely untrue, though - I suspect it counts as "true" in the same way that you can truthfully claim that Americans have to work almost until June to reach "Tax Freedom Day", the day we stop working just to pay our taxes, and start our year "in the black" so to speak.
So, I suppose that in some retail sectors, the fairly thin profit margins mean that, if you add up all their costs for the coming year and start counting income against them from January 1st onward, they might experience an analogous "Overhead Freedom Day" sometime in late November. But looking at the numbers like that would leave everything after that point, including the very lucrative holiday season, as pure profit... So not quite such a bleak outlook as staying in the red for 11 months.
Or to look at from a more common-sense approach - Why even open the doors from February to October if you'll only run a loss for the first 11 months? They'd make more, in the long run, to go on vacation for nine or ten months out of the year.
>>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).
You don't have kids yet do you. I hope whomever you have ruined x-mass won't return the favor. I guess you have never seen a kid's joy on the morning of x-mass or organizing the Easter egg hunt for 30 kids in the neighborhood ( does not matter the faith, the fun is in the search ).
we still make cookies for Santa and leave a carrot out for Rudolph. I hope to do it for ever.
Onepoint
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