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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
Are you trying to say that our media is creating and over-hyping something that doesn't necessarily exist to make for better headlines? Noooooo... not our media....
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
On CyberMonday, my whole family stands in line for hours to buy stuff on the Internet! It gets to fisticuffs and hair-pulling when it comes to grabbing the mouse and clicking on the 'Complete Purchase' button!
Well, most of the hits on the google search are from msg board posts that actually say "Wanna cyber, Monday?"
From the article:
They quickly discarded suggestions such as Black Monday (too much like Black Friday), Blue Monday (not very cheery), and Green Monday (too environmentalist), and settled on Cyber Monday.
I would call it - 'November's fools day'.
DOH! Does this mean I missed the biggest day of the year to get online and talk dirty to women who are actually men pretending to be women pretending to like men who are pretending not to like little boys?
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
I somehow doubt that google has spidered and indexed ~800k sites/pages containing such phrase, in that time period.
Somebody has a case of the cyber-Mondays!
The first Monday after Thanksgiving has always been and will always be Deer Slaying Day. Hell, we have off for work and school, just so we can go slay some of those fierce creatures.
Sheesh...get it right.
It's kind of like Snake Whacking day...only with deer.
Watch out those antlers can be nasty!
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
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.
Marge: "Happy Love Day everyone!"
Lisa: "Come on Mom! The stores just invented this holiday because they wanted to make money!"
Homer: "Lisa don't you ruin another love day!"
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
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 ?
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!
Yeah, of all people my Mom told me about this on Sunday. I am an online retailer, and historically the Monday after Thanksgiving has not been the best, however yesterday was our largest day ever on record, beating the prior largest day by about 40% more! I belive because of the hype produced by the media, it subconsciously persuaded people who would have bought on Tuesday or Wednesday to buy on Monday. I hate it when my Mom is right!!! -=Dave
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Please contact me urgently about a large number of emails intended for you that have ended up in my inbox.
I found this out first hand. I work at UPS in one of the sorting hubs (we get a lot of stuff from amazon and other online retailers). We were gearing up for Monday (when a lot of stuff was suppose to ship and get to us) and we didn't get too busy. Busier than normal but no where near the hype.
She promptly informed me that the day was 'Cyber Day' and that everything on the Internet was 50% off.
That'd be my dream. I told her that the only thing that was half off was women's clothing at myspace.com. She then asked me if I've ever shopped there before.
I thought I saw you in line. Remember me? We met in the gas lines after the hurricane. I met your brother once in line for Styx tickets and your Uncle in another line for space mountain. Man I love waiting in lines....
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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?