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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."

20 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Are you trying to say... by lbrandy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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....

    1. Re:Are you trying to say... by MCraigW · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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...

    2. Re:Are you trying to say... by ortholattice · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

  2. greeting card strategem by know1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  3. It's twoo, it's twoo! by glomph · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  4. Google index by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, most of the hits on the google search are from msg board posts that actually say "Wanna cyber, Monday?"

  5. An alternative name... by ysegalov · · Score: 5, Funny

    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'.

  6. Re:Uh by myspys · · Score: 4, Informative

    looking at google now, it's up to 1.8m

    look at the results though, they are from cnn, yahoo, cnet etc etc
    all big sites, and as you can probably guess, google crawls these sites a few times every day

    so google crawling and indexing 1.8m pages in a week isn't impossible at all

  7. Re:Uh by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, we have the primary news sites, then we have the secondary news sites, then we have news blogs (like this one), then every fricking blog and message board, then all the spam-blogs...I googled it just a second ago and got 2,060,000 hits. So if it can jump from 800k at the time of submission, to 2,060,000 hopefully not too much later, I think you may be underestimating how many people can talk abotu nothing, and how fast google can make that meaningless blather available to the world.

    Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go google this post.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  8. O rly? by parasonic · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  9. Uh guys, It's was Deer Slaying Day.... by FirstNoel · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!"
    1. Re:Uh guys, It's was Deer Slaying Day.... by evilviper · · Score: 4, Funny
      Watch out those antlers can be nasty!

      My sister was once bitten by a moose.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  10. No. by CyricZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  11. Love Day by farfisa69 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  12. For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist! by pla · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist! by pla · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!"

  13. Re:Uh by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're doubting the freshness of the term, try searching in Google Groups instead. A usenet search can often give you a better picture of how a term or phrase evolved through culture.

    "Black Friday" - 11,000 results dating back to at least 1993.

    "Cyber Monday" - 20 results, all but one were indeed posted within the past week. The other one is in Russian, and doesn't actually appear to contain the term.

    So, if there was such a thing as "Cyber Monday" prior to this Thanksgiving, nobody seemed to know about it, and they sure as heck weren't discussing it.

    --
    "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
  14. Re:Uh by WebCrapper · · Score: 4, Informative

    It all depends on how you search...

    Without quotation marks I get 5.2M results. With marks, I get 706k and the top 100 results (ok, so I scanned the top 100) are all news sites printing or reprinting stories.

    I have to agree here. It appears that someone coined the term and something happened. I'd love to see the historical data off some of the larger E-tailers to see if the term increased sales. If so, I'm predicting that retailers will start naming different days in the year to try to get more sales.

    BTW, in case no one knew this Black Friday is historically a day when something bad happens.

    Oh - and it looks like "Cyber Monday" is now on Wikipedia as well. Oddly enough, its pending deletion...

    The term Cyber Monday is a fairly recent term which refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Similar to Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year when retail stores often offer great deals, "Cyber Monday" has in recent years been a busy day for online retailers, and one in which online stores offer similarly low prices.
    [edit]

    Origin of term

    The term "Cyber Monday" is a neologism invented by the National Retail Federation, and was never in common use within the ecommerce community. According to shop.org, Scott Silverman, the Executive Director of the company, coined the term during a meeting in August or September 2005 to describe an emerging trend first noticed on the Monday after Thanksgiving, 2004.

  15. Re:Talliwhacker Tuesday! by jrumney · · Score: 5, Funny
    Alas, I cannot participate, as I suffer from severe impotency.

    Please contact me urgently about a large number of emails intended for you that have ended up in my inbox.

  16. My niece called on the phone. by AtariDatacenter · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.