November 25, 2021 • 37 mins
When did the trend of Cyber Monday begin? We take a look at the history of one of the Internet's biggest annual events.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And here in the
United States it is Thanksgiving, which means we here at
tech Stuff are currently on holiday. I don't know about Torii,
(00:27):
but my guess is by the time you're listening to this,
I am stuffing my face with festive foods and uh.
Because I don't want to leave you without an episode,
I thought we would rerun an episode from a couple
of years ago. I think this is going to be
an annual tradition about the history of Cyber Monday, because
here in the US, the day after Thanksgiving is typically
(00:48):
called Black Friday. That is a day when stores are
offering tons of different sales in order to attract people
to come in and buy tons of stuff. It's timed
so that you know it's it's right at the beginning
of the holiday shopping season, so people are trying to
get their gifts all in order for their loved ones.
(01:10):
But Cyber Monday grew out a few well many years
later down the road, and this episode goes into its history.
So I hope you enjoy this episode about cyber Monday,
and you know to keep a lookout for deals because
they do pop up around this time of year. And
I'll be back to talk with you again in a
(01:32):
little bit today. I thought i'd changed things up a
bit and talk about the history and evolution of cyber Monday.
So where did this come from? And are the deals
on cyber Monday really great? And I guess the answer
to that second question is essentially, uh, it depends. But
first let's talk about some history. So before there was
(01:55):
cyber Monday, there was Black Friday, both in the sense
that Black Friday is a thing is older than Cyber Monday,
and also cyber Monday is the Monday that follows Black Friday,
so technically it's true in two different senses. All right,
So what is Black Friday? One of the United States,
Black Friday is the friday following Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in the
(02:17):
United States falls on the fourth Thursday of November, at
least it has ever since nineteen thirty nine, when Franklin
Delano Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week from the
final Thursday of November. Now, since November two thousand eighteen
started on a Thursday. November one was a Thursday. That
means that two thousand eighteen will see Thanksgiving fall as
(02:39):
early as it can, which means November two. The latest
it can fall in the month is November. Anyway, Black
Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Now,
there is an apocryphal story that says the origins of
Black Friday are deeply racist and tie to the United
(03:00):
States history with slavery. According to that story, slave traders
would sell slaves at a discount on the day after
Thanksgiving to help plantation owners who are going to want
to purchase more slaves to do work leading up to
the winter. That's a horrible, horrible thing. But the story
(03:20):
isn't true at all. And honestly, I find it hard
to believe that slave traders would respond to an increase
in demand by lowering their prices. They already seem like terrible,
terrible human beings. I don't think of them as being
particularly altruistic. However, we can put that whole explanation aside. Anyway,
(03:40):
If anyone tells you Black Friday is based in slavery,
that is not true. The term Black Friday in relation
to the day after Thanksgiving did not appear in print
until the nineteen fifties. As far as we can determine.
There was, however, an earlier version of Black Friday, though
that was the day after Thanksgiving. That Black Friday wasn't
(04:03):
associated with a holiday at all, but rather with a
stock market crash that happened on Friday, September twenty, eighteen
sixty nine. The cause of that crash was that there
were two speculators named Jay Gould and James Fisk, and
together they were able to drive up gold prices way
(04:24):
way up while they were trying to corner the market
on gold on the New York Gold Exchange. They had
even planted a story to convince US President Ulysses S.
Grant to stop gold sales. They had this report that
it was going to hurt farmers out west. Meanwhile, they
bought up as much gold as they could and that
(04:47):
raised gold prices as a result. So they thought they
were gonna be rich. They're gonna buy up the gold
and then they could sell it off at these elevated prices. However,
President Grant found out about it, and he ordered the
release of millie ends of dollars of gold to be
made available on the market, and that caused prices to crash.
Suddenly there was way more supply, and this crash ended
(05:10):
up affecting the stock market as well. However, this was
a moment of acute pain. It was a sharp depth
in the stock market, thus the name Black Friday, but
in the long termment that the nation was actually able
to avoid a more persistent depression, so it ended up
turning out better than it otherwise would have. The earliest
(05:31):
known reference to the day after thanks Giving being Black
Friday dates to nineteen fifty one from a periodical titled
Factory Management and Maintenance. But it was a real page turner.
But in that article, the author was describing this tendency
for workers to call in sick the day after Thanksgiving,
(05:54):
and really they were just trying to make a long
weekend out of the holiday because at that time it
is not commonplace for most businesses to close down on
both Thursday, the day of Thanksgiving, and Friday. So this
piece was sort of sardonically comparing the malaise being felt
by workers across the nation to the bubonic plague also
(06:16):
known as the Black Death everyone would just mysteriously be
sick that Friday and not show up to work. It
would take another decade before we would see the name
Black Friday associated with shopping for the day after Thanksgiving.
This would come out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The local police
(06:37):
force there would refer to that Friday and that Saturday
following Thanksgiving US both Black Friday and Black Saturday. This
was because those two days had become the busiest shopping
days of the year. Thanksgiving leads into the holiday season,
and in post World War two America, the holiday season
was beginning to be associated and has been said, ends
(07:00):
with lots of material gifts. Consumerism was on the rise.
A lot of people had a lot more discretionary income
and a desire to spend it. So the police referred
to Friday and Saturday as Black Friday and Black Saturday
because of the headaches that came along with all that
busy shopping, mostly in the form of stuff like traffic
(07:21):
problems and shoplifting. Plus the fact that this rise in
activity meant it was virtually impossible to get the day
off if you were a Philadelphia cop, and you would
probably have to put in an extra long shift to boot,
so they didn't really like it. Now, in the nineteen eighties,
a new version of the history of Black Friday popped up,
(07:45):
and this version claimed that the name Black Friday stemmed
from the fact that it was on that day that
many merchants would finally see their annual figures show a profit.
The idea was that the enormous amount of business on
that Friday would take businesses from operating at a loss
or operating in the red in other words, and push
(08:07):
them toward profitability or operating in the black. Thus black Friday.
Now that refers to the practice of denoting losses or
negative numbers in a ledger using red ink and positive
numbers using black ink. And while that's a cute story,
it's not, you know, real. In fact, a lot of
(08:28):
stores see more sales on the Saturday before Christmas because
lots of Americans are procrastinators. But this fictional history of
the origin of Black Friday took hold in the American psyche,
and to go along with it, stores began holding big
sales to bring more and more shoppers into their stores.
(08:50):
And this strategy worked, and every year we would see
more efforts to make it even bigger, with stuff like
door buster offers, so called because those sales offer seemingly
huge discounts right at opening hours and are typically those
those figures, those those amounts, those discounts are only available
(09:11):
for a very short time, or the inventory for those
products is so small that the store will no doubt
sell out within minutes of opening, or both in many cases.
So often these sales are tied to an effort to
move older merchandise out of stores to make way for
newer products. So stuff like electronics, particularly big ticket items
(09:33):
like televisions or small appliances, tend to take up some space,
and manufacturers want to come out with new models every year,
and according to uh Adam Burakowski of Wirecutter, large appliances
are kind of a an exception. You rarely see big,
significant markdowns on large appliances, but small appliances and televisions,
(09:54):
which can get pretty darn big these days, they can
get marked off quite a bit, and most lee in
order to make room for new models. Black Friday opened
up a chance for stores to offload older stuff, perhaps
at a discount, after sales had slowed down considerably, so
by the nineteen eighties, Black Friday was established as the
formal beginning of the holiday shopping season, and while some
(10:17):
online service providers like compu Serve would introduce online shopping
in the nineteen eighties, it was a far distant second
to shopping in physical stores. It had barely registered. It
really wasn't until the mid nineteen nineties when Netscape one
point oh incorporated the Secure Socket Layer Protocol the SSL protocol.
(10:41):
That's when online transactions could be considered truly secure for
the first time. That led to the possibility of turning
the Internet, and specifically the Web, into a commerce destination.
Sites like Amazon and eBay helped usher in a new
era of commerce, making it practical and then desirable to
(11:02):
shop online. While those two sites saw a lot of success,
the early days of e commerce also saw a lot
of businesses rush into that space without really forming a
strategy around it. After the dust would settle in the
wake of the dot com bubble implosion in the early
two thousand's, companies began to take a more measured approach
and e commerce started to come into its own. In
(11:24):
two thousand five, a marketing team led by Ellen Davis
at a company called shop dot Org introduced the concept
of cyber Monday. This would be e commerce's response to
Black Friday, the sales pitch road itself. Why would you
leave your comfortable home and brave potentially bad weather and
(11:44):
guaranteed terrible traffic to fight your way into a store
only to find out that the thing you wanted to
buy has already sold out. Why risk getting hurt or
worse as single minded consumers shove and elbow and kick
their way to get the last tickle me Elmo doll
(12:04):
or whatever must have items happened to be on sale
that year. Why not instead sit at home and order
your holiday gifts online and have them either delivered to
you or even to the people you plan to give
gifts to. You take out the whole step of having
to take the gifts to the people. Cyber Monday was born.
(12:26):
I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, the
concept of cyber Monday didn't just arrive out of the blue.
For a few years leading up to two thousand five,
(12:47):
analysts had seen a boost and online line sales on
the Monday following Black Friday. They had seen this trend
happening so maybe some people were late to the game
and they weren't able to land a deal on Black Friday.
Maybe some of them weren't able to get hold of
that must have item in a physical store, so now
(13:08):
they were looking online. But whatever the reason, by two
thousand five, Cyber Monday was one of the busier online
shopping days of the year, but not the busiest, in fact,
not even in the top ten. By two thousand five,
it was more like the twelfth most popular shopping day
online at that point. But the Cyber Monday marketing idea
(13:30):
would change that. So the media, here's about this idea
in two thousand five, and they jump all over this
concept of Cyber Monday. And this is no surprise. News
about sales tends to get a lot of attention, whether
it's in print, audio, or television spots. You've probably seen
(13:50):
countless articles and videos that lists the biggest Black Friday
or Cyber Monday deals. There's a whole industry around this.
There are groups that start putting out information about it
before November even starts to talk about the big Black
Friday or Cyber Monday deals that are coming down the line.
So media outlets were highly motivated to take this new
(14:13):
concept and to run with it. Online retailers would get
on board too, because the media coverage amounted to free
publicity and they started to see their sales increase. So
two thousand five was a good start. Analysts estimated the
online retailers saw about four eight four million dollars in
sales collectively on that Monday that year. But the retailers
(14:36):
would prepare themselves to really push for it in a
big way in the years to follow. By creating promotions
and sales tied to this concept of cyber Monday, they
could actually increase sales dramatically over a typical shopping day online.
In two thousand and six, CNN ran a story that
(14:59):
point it out that certain sought after items were being
really scarce in brick and mortar stores but were available online.
The article had the title, for e tailors, It's Cyber Monday,
and it had a subheadline that said traffic tracking services
showed a fifty increase in Internet traffic at various online
(15:21):
commerce sites on that Monday. The sought after items included
stuff like the PlayStation three gaming console from Sony, Nintendo's
we gaming console, and the aforementioned Elmo, though this one
was the Tickle Me Elmo t m X. And by
the way, just as a side note, I actually watched
(15:41):
a video of that Elmo toy for this podcast because
I'm nothing if not thorough in my research, and I
didn't remember this toy. That's why I was like, what
is the tickle Me Elmo t MX? How is that
different from the Tickle Me Elmo, which was a doll
that would laugh and vibrate like crazy whenever you activated it.
So in the video I saw Elmo as a toy
(16:05):
that could stand up. Is is actually standing and you
would activate it by pressing certain points on the doll
and it would start to laugh and it moves its
arms and eventually it bends over like it's laughing so
hard it can't stand up straight. It falls over onto
the ground, and then ultimately at the end of this
it stands itself back up. The best part about this
(16:26):
story is while I was watching this, my coworker Noel Brown,
who's one of the hosts of Ridiculous History, walked up
behind me and he asked me what the heck was
I watching. Although he didn't use those words, he he
was a bit more coarse in his language, but upon
explaining it, he shook his head and walked away. That's
the typical response I get here at the office. In
(16:46):
two thousand seven, online sales were up to seven hundred
thirty million dollars. Then, in December two thousand seven, the
United States entered what was later called the Great Recession.
This was when real estate market collapsed, which in turn
made mortgage backed securities issued by banks to fall in
(17:06):
value dramatically, and that in turn threatened the solvency of
various financial institutions like those banks that led to the
government bailouts of banks and businesses began laying off workers
and eliminating jobs. It doubled the unemployment rate in the
United States until it hit ten percent. Now, the reason
I mentioned all of that is because, despite this economic downturn,
(17:31):
online retailers would see a year over year increase in
sales from two thousand seven to two thousand eight two
thousand seven seven thirty million dollars two thousand eight, eight
hundred forty six million dollars despite the economic downturn. Now,
one possible reason for the higher number is that people
(17:52):
weren't just looking for a good deal in two thousand eight,
they needed good deals. People still wanted to buy presents
for friends and family, but money was tight, so sales
were more important than ever. An online seemed to give
the biggest access to those sales. The holiday season in
two thousand eight also saw a rising battle between traditional
(18:13):
retailer Walmart an online giant Amazon. Amazon would take the
number one spot according to traffic tracking services, with an
increase of twenty one percent more traffic year over year. Walmart,
by comparison, only saw a six percent increase. More importantly,
for Amazon, it became the most popular online destination for
(18:37):
commerce on Cyber Monday. In two thousand nine, com Score,
which is a data analysis firm, published a report that
said forty one point six percent of all online shoppers
were logging in from home, but fifty two point nine
percent were logging in from work. So maybe that don't
want to go to work itis bubonic plague that prompted
(18:59):
that initial article that gave us the term Black Friday
for the day after Thanksgiving, maybe that now extends to
everyone on the following Monday. They might be at work,
but instead of actually working, they could be scouring the
internet for the best deals in lowest prices, same as
it ever was. I guess Walmart would strike back against
(19:21):
Amazon in two thousand nine when when it announced cyber
Week and set the chorus for things as they are now.
This extended the sales that Walmart was showing off for
a full week following Thanksgiving. That would prompt other retailers
to follow suit in and would also be when Cyber
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Monday would become the busiest online shopping day of the year,
and it's been that way ever since. Was also the
first year that Cyber Monday sales would top one billion dollars.
But just to put things into perspective, that same year
saw shoppers visit real world stores to the tune of
ten point seven billion dollars in sales, So cyber Monday
(20:07):
was a big success, but it was still trailing far
behind Black Friday and traditional stores. The next year in
c NBC rather predictably reported that Black Friday and Cyber
Monday had effectively gloamed together to create this mutated beast
of a long shopping weekend, and we were starting to
(20:28):
see sales extend further out in both directions from Black Friday.
While this also had the effect of cannibalizing some of
the sales on Friday and Monday themselves. Ultimately, I'm pretty
sure merchants don't really care when they're selling stuff. They
just care if they are selling it and how much
they're able to sell. In two thousand twelve, we would
(20:49):
see another shift in consumer behavior, one that would shape
the way retailers would target customers. More shoppers, nearly twenty
percent of them began to smartphones to look at cyber deals.
This was a twelve percent increase from the previous year
and also an indication that mobile browsing was the future.
(21:09):
And this, by the way, was something the entire online
content world was starting to realize. Right around this point.
Anyone who worked in that world, such as yours truly
was starting to think about ways to optimize content for
the mobile experience. It was clear that companies that could
make their online experience a positive one, no matter what
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sort of device someone might use to access it, would
be well ahead of the game. That included e commerce sites,
which began to invest more money in creating user interfaces
for their stores, specifically for smartphones. In all, consumers spent
one point four six five billion dollars in online shopping
(21:50):
on Cyber Monday. In two thousand twelve, electronics, computer hardware,
and video games all experienced huge jumps in sales gains
year over year, but the top performing category according to
com Score was in digital content and subscriptions. Also by
two thousand twelve, there was a pretty much even split
(22:10):
between people buying stuff while surfing the web from home
and those who were still on the clock at work.
In two thousand thirteen, fashion websites began to finally get
in on this Cyber Monday game. Clothing retailers like Old
Navy started to launch their own Cyber Monday deals, taking
advantage of the same shopping frenzy as other retailers. And
this actually reminds us that one of the values of
(22:33):
these days, both Black Friday and of Cyber Monday, to retailers,
in large part is due to the fact that we
as consumers have been conditioned to shop on those days.
So many people are already in a mindset to go
out there and get ready to buy stuff, and by
leveraging that from the retail side and pairing a good
(22:53):
deal or two to take advantage of it wherever you can,
just makes really good business sense. In two thousand fifty,
Target announced it was offering up a fifteen percent discount
across all of Target dot Com for Cyber Monday, showing
that the big retail businesses were really playing serious at
this point and in things would really go crazy as
(23:15):
the concept of cyber Week took hold for more retailers.
I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's
take another quick break to thank our sponsor so In.
According to calm Score, retailers saw eleven billion dollars in
(23:38):
sales during cyber Week. Now that started on Monday, November
and it ended on December four. Cyber Monday itself accounted
for nearly two point seven billion dollars in sales all alone.
And not only that, but starting on Thanksgiving Day, e
commerce sites collectively saw more than one billion dollars of
(23:59):
sales every day for eleven days straight. It drove the
holiday season sales, which combs scored defined as starting on
November one and indig on December four, to achieve nearly
thirty eight billion dollars in sales. That's a ton of money. Also,
in twenty sixteen, one two million people in the United
(24:22):
States did some online shopping on cyber Monday. But on
Black Friday only one hundred sixteen million Americans did any shopping,
and that includes sixty seven point nine million people who
were doing online shopping. So in twenty sixteen, cyber Monday
pulled ahead of Black Friday as the busiest shopping day
(24:44):
in the United States and all without having to line
up in front of a store at three in the morning.
In comm Score reported that consumers spent three point three
six billion dollars on Cyber Monday from usk top computers,
so just from desktops. According to the Verge, purchases made
(25:06):
from mobile devices accounted for another two billion dollars in sales.
And according to multiple sources, although this doesn't really match
up with the com Score numbers, the collective cyber Monday
sales efforts in twenty seventeen amounted to six point five
nine billion dollars in sales. Now, if you look at
the sales figures from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online sales
(25:29):
amounted to nineteen point six to billion dollars, truly an
enormous sum of money. Now. According to a survey from
National Retail Federation as well as a company called prosper
Insights and Analytics that partnered to make this survey. Fifty
eight million Americans chose to do their holiday shopping online,
(25:51):
only fifty one million chose to shop only at physical stores,
and more than sixty four million Americans did some combination
of the two. So while online shopping has definitely pulled
ahead of going to actual brick and mortar stores, there's
still a place for those physical shops. They are not obsolete.
(26:13):
People are still shopping there in droves, just they're doing
it more online. The Wall Street Journal reported that brick
and mortar stores did see a decrease of about four
percent in the number of people visiting those stores in
compared to the same time in so we are seeing
fewer people going to these stores. It's not quite to
(26:34):
the point where I would want to try and go
out on Black Friday. I think there's still way too
many people out there, but we're getting there now. There
is a growing concern that by extending these deals out
from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the whole Cyber week thing,
and the Black Friday sales that start two weeks before Thanksgiving,
that these sales are going to lose their luster, and
(26:56):
again part of what drives so much sales activity are
the limitations around the sales dates. If you make items
available only for a limited time at a lower price,
it drives up consumer interest and it encourages shopping. You
just introduced that idea in a customer's head that the
thing that kind of sort of wanted is only going
(27:18):
to be at a discounted price for a short while,
and then you're more likely to move them to actually
buy that thing. But if you extend the sale out,
you make it less special. You dilute that effect to
some extent, and the danger is that ultimately you'll start
to see sales slow down or worse yet, decline as
a result, because people don't feel compelled to go out
(27:41):
and buy that thing because it's been marked down. As
for what is driving the popularity of online shopping, a
lot of it is opportunity. More people have access to
getting online than ever before, and for many people, working
at a computer is part of their job, so they
can easily access us these deals whether they're at work
(28:02):
or at home. For other people, a smartphone and a
credit card is really all they need to get some
shopping in, So even if employees are limiting their online shopping,
just times when they're on break and they're not actually
trying to snag a deal on the company dime. You
would still expect to see growth in this field, just
because we're seeing more penetration in computer access and internet access.
(28:25):
The National Retail Federation predicts that in retailers will see
an increase in sales between four point three percent and
four point eight percent. That's actually a step down from
the increase in twenty seventeen that was at five point
five percent. Over the figures, but it still means that
we're going to see more sales this year, and it
(28:47):
would mean that the entire holiday season, not just Black
Friday and Cyber Monday, but during the course of the
holiday season, we will see sales between seven hundred seventeen
point five billion dollars and seven point nine billion dollars,
getting close to a trillion dollars in sales over the
(29:09):
holiday season. That is crazy. So now let's get down
to brass tacks. How do you find good deals? Well,
like I mentioned earlier, deals are happening before and after
Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so those days don't really
matter as much in the grand scheme. Of things. By
the time you are listening to this episode, on the
(29:31):
day that it publishes, deals are already going on. Amazon
typically leads the charge, and I imagine part of this
strategy is that they're trying to head off all the
retailers at the past. They're trying to get ahead of them,
get ahead of Black Friday, because there's a limited amount
of money out there. Right, Shoppers are only going to
spend so much this year, so Amazon wants to get
(29:55):
ahead of all the other deals to get as much
of those dollars as it possibly can. That's the deal
with business, right. Online sales are actually best on Thanksgiving Day,
typically with an average discount of twenty Categories of stuff
that tends to have the biggest discounts on Thanksgiving Day
(30:17):
include things like sporting goods, computers, video games, and clothing.
So if you're shopping for any of those things, set
aside some time on Turkey Day to pop online and
check out some deals. But if you want to buy
something like a television or a tablet, computer, or maybe
a small appliance, your best bet for the biggest discount
online is actually Black Friday, not Cyber Monday. But there's
(30:41):
no need for you to jump in a car and
head to the local mall, you just go online. Online
sales tend to be best for those items. On the
old traditional shopping day, Cyber Monday is still great for
a lot of different deals, but if you're really in
the market for something new, or you're looking to save
the most money on gifts thanksgiving him, Black Friday, or
when you should pop open the computer and hunt around
(31:03):
a bit. It's also a great idea to do some
research on the various items that are for sale. You
might find that the discounted items are ones that are
not really the best in their class. They might lack
some interesting features. This happens a lot with television's. You'll
see a lot of TVs get marked way down. Then
if you do a little research, you might find out, oh,
(31:25):
well that's because that television doesn't have a particularly high
resolution or it's got a lot of limited features. And
then you realize, well, yeah, I could buy a television
for super cheap, but it's not necessarily a good TV.
So you want to do that research. And just because
something is being sold at a big discount doesn't always
mean it's worth buying. Also, it's not a bad idea
(31:48):
to look around to see what the price history was
of certain items. Every now and then a retailer will
mark up an item just before a big sale, and
that way, when they put in the discount, the sale
price is really not that different from the original price
(32:08):
of the item. It could be that in October you
could have bought something for five dollars, and then going
into November it gets marked up to six dollars, But
then the discount means that they're selling it for four
seventy five dollars, So it looks like a bigger discount
because the original price appears to have been six hundred,
(32:28):
But if you go back just a little further, you
see that the price was lower earlier. Just be careful.
Sometimes that deal that's too good to be true is
too good to be true. Online holiday sales tend to
feature pretty good deals leading all the way up to
Green Monday. Now, Green Monday is the second Monday in December,
and it's just ten shipping days out from Christmas Day,
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meaning if you wait any longer, you may not have
enough time for your order to get to you before
the gift giving festivities occur in That day falls on
December ten, and the name Green Monday actually comes from
the site eBay. eBay coined the term green Monday in
two thousand seven. That was after they had noticed that
(33:15):
this particular Monday had some of the highest sales of
the year. In fact, it was the busiest online shopping
day for quite some time. Cyber Monday would pass Green
Monday in two thousand nine during the Great Recession, and
then Cyber Monday would ultimately become the busiest online shopping
day and Green Monday would fall quite a bit. But
(33:37):
it's still very popular online shopping day. In fact, now
I think it's climbed back up to number two. It
was down in its number five for a while, but
I think it's back up to number two at this point.
So until Green Monday, you're likely to see some pretty
good deals online. And that is the history and evolution
of cyber Monday. Again, it's some combination of marketing, some
(34:02):
combination of psychology, some combination of just trying to capitalize
on already established consumer habits. It's good to know all
of these elements because it informs you before you start
making decisions on what you're gonna buy and who you're
going to buy it from. Also, small Business Saturday is
(34:23):
still a thing, and I still really like it. I
like supporting small local businesses when I can, because you
can get some really unique stuff. I know that that's
redundant to say really unique, but you can get stuff
that you can't find anywhere else from a lot of
small businesses, and you support people who are working really
hard to keep those businesses going. And might mean paying
(34:44):
a little more for the gift, but it also probably
mean the gift means a little more, so it all
evens out right. I hope you enjoyed that episode about
the history of cyber Monday, and uh, if you are
hunting for deals, I hope that you find them. Keep
it mind this year is, like last year, very challenging.
They're still supply chain issues all around the world. So
(35:08):
my recommendation is, don't have your heart set on any
specific product unless you just happen to know it's in
stock somewhere that you can get it. Uh, and you know,
keep your keep your options open, and keep be patient
because there are a ton of people out there trying
desperately to get things on track, but there are a
(35:28):
lot of factors that are making it complicated for products
to get to customers, and UH, as long as we
keep that in mind, and we keep in mind that
the most important thing is to let the people we
love know that we love them and that hopefully they
appreciate that, I think we'll get through it. Also, I mean,
(35:48):
if you can, it's always good to shop locally and
support your local artists and crafts people and you know,
the folks who make stuff in your community. UH as
the biggest impact if you can do that. I realized
not everyone is in a place where that's a possibility,
but if that's an option, I highly recommend looking into it.
(36:10):
I know that for me, getting something that's like from
a local crafts person has a lot more meaning than
say a PlayStation five. Um, but if you have an
extra PlayStation five, I'll take it because I can't find
one of those anywhere. Okay, So that wraps up this episode.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me.
(36:32):
The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
handle for the show is text Stuff H s W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(36:53):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And here in the
United States it is Thanksgiving, which means we here at
tech Stuff are currently on holiday. I don't know about Torii,
(00:27):
but my guess is by the time you're listening to this,
I am stuffing my face with festive foods and uh.
Because I don't want to leave you without an episode,
I thought we would rerun an episode from a couple
of years ago. I think this is going to be
an annual tradition about the history of Cyber Monday, because
here in the US, the day after Thanksgiving is typically
(00:48):
called Black Friday. That is a day when stores are
offering tons of different sales in order to attract people
to come in and buy tons of stuff. It's timed
so that you know it's it's right at the beginning
of the holiday shopping season, so people are trying to
get their gifts all in order for their loved ones.
(01:10):
But Cyber Monday grew out a few well many years
later down the road, and this episode goes into its history.
So I hope you enjoy this episode about cyber Monday,
and you know to keep a lookout for deals because
they do pop up around this time of year. And
I'll be back to talk with you again in a
(01:32):
little bit today. I thought i'd changed things up a
bit and talk about the history and evolution of cyber Monday.
So where did this come from? And are the deals
on cyber Monday really great? And I guess the answer
to that second question is essentially, uh, it depends. But
first let's talk about some history. So before there was
(01:55):
cyber Monday, there was Black Friday, both in the sense
that Black Friday is a thing is older than Cyber Monday,
and also cyber Monday is the Monday that follows Black Friday,
so technically it's true in two different senses. All right,
So what is Black Friday? One of the United States,
Black Friday is the friday following Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in the
(02:17):
United States falls on the fourth Thursday of November, at
least it has ever since nineteen thirty nine, when Franklin
Delano Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week from the
final Thursday of November. Now, since November two thousand eighteen
started on a Thursday. November one was a Thursday. That
means that two thousand eighteen will see Thanksgiving fall as
(02:39):
early as it can, which means November two. The latest
it can fall in the month is November. Anyway, Black
Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Now,
there is an apocryphal story that says the origins of
Black Friday are deeply racist and tie to the United
(03:00):
States history with slavery. According to that story, slave traders
would sell slaves at a discount on the day after
Thanksgiving to help plantation owners who are going to want
to purchase more slaves to do work leading up to
the winter. That's a horrible, horrible thing. But the story
(03:20):
isn't true at all. And honestly, I find it hard
to believe that slave traders would respond to an increase
in demand by lowering their prices. They already seem like terrible,
terrible human beings. I don't think of them as being
particularly altruistic. However, we can put that whole explanation aside. Anyway,
(03:40):
If anyone tells you Black Friday is based in slavery,
that is not true. The term Black Friday in relation
to the day after Thanksgiving did not appear in print
until the nineteen fifties. As far as we can determine.
There was, however, an earlier version of Black Friday, though
that was the day after Thanksgiving. That Black Friday wasn't
(04:03):
associated with a holiday at all, but rather with a
stock market crash that happened on Friday, September twenty, eighteen
sixty nine. The cause of that crash was that there
were two speculators named Jay Gould and James Fisk, and
together they were able to drive up gold prices way
(04:24):
way up while they were trying to corner the market
on gold on the New York Gold Exchange. They had
even planted a story to convince US President Ulysses S.
Grant to stop gold sales. They had this report that
it was going to hurt farmers out west. Meanwhile, they
bought up as much gold as they could and that
(04:47):
raised gold prices as a result. So they thought they
were gonna be rich. They're gonna buy up the gold
and then they could sell it off at these elevated prices. However,
President Grant found out about it, and he ordered the
release of millie ends of dollars of gold to be
made available on the market, and that caused prices to crash.
Suddenly there was way more supply, and this crash ended
(05:10):
up affecting the stock market as well. However, this was
a moment of acute pain. It was a sharp depth
in the stock market, thus the name Black Friday, but
in the long termment that the nation was actually able
to avoid a more persistent depression, so it ended up
turning out better than it otherwise would have. The earliest
(05:31):
known reference to the day after thanks Giving being Black
Friday dates to nineteen fifty one from a periodical titled
Factory Management and Maintenance. But it was a real page turner.
But in that article, the author was describing this tendency
for workers to call in sick the day after Thanksgiving,
(05:54):
and really they were just trying to make a long
weekend out of the holiday because at that time it
is not commonplace for most businesses to close down on
both Thursday, the day of Thanksgiving, and Friday. So this
piece was sort of sardonically comparing the malaise being felt
by workers across the nation to the bubonic plague also
(06:16):
known as the Black Death everyone would just mysteriously be
sick that Friday and not show up to work. It
would take another decade before we would see the name
Black Friday associated with shopping for the day after Thanksgiving.
This would come out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The local police
(06:37):
force there would refer to that Friday and that Saturday
following Thanksgiving US both Black Friday and Black Saturday. This
was because those two days had become the busiest shopping
days of the year. Thanksgiving leads into the holiday season,
and in post World War two America, the holiday season
was beginning to be associated and has been said, ends
(07:00):
with lots of material gifts. Consumerism was on the rise.
A lot of people had a lot more discretionary income
and a desire to spend it. So the police referred
to Friday and Saturday as Black Friday and Black Saturday
because of the headaches that came along with all that
busy shopping, mostly in the form of stuff like traffic
(07:21):
problems and shoplifting. Plus the fact that this rise in
activity meant it was virtually impossible to get the day
off if you were a Philadelphia cop, and you would
probably have to put in an extra long shift to boot,
so they didn't really like it. Now, in the nineteen eighties,
a new version of the history of Black Friday popped up,
(07:45):
and this version claimed that the name Black Friday stemmed
from the fact that it was on that day that
many merchants would finally see their annual figures show a profit.
The idea was that the enormous amount of business on
that Friday would take businesses from operating at a loss
or operating in the red in other words, and push
(08:07):
them toward profitability or operating in the black. Thus black Friday.
Now that refers to the practice of denoting losses or
negative numbers in a ledger using red ink and positive
numbers using black ink. And while that's a cute story,
it's not, you know, real. In fact, a lot of
(08:28):
stores see more sales on the Saturday before Christmas because
lots of Americans are procrastinators. But this fictional history of
the origin of Black Friday took hold in the American psyche,
and to go along with it, stores began holding big
sales to bring more and more shoppers into their stores.
(08:50):
And this strategy worked, and every year we would see
more efforts to make it even bigger, with stuff like
door buster offers, so called because those sales offer seemingly
huge discounts right at opening hours and are typically those
those figures, those those amounts, those discounts are only available
(09:11):
for a very short time, or the inventory for those
products is so small that the store will no doubt
sell out within minutes of opening, or both in many cases.
So often these sales are tied to an effort to
move older merchandise out of stores to make way for
newer products. So stuff like electronics, particularly big ticket items
(09:33):
like televisions or small appliances, tend to take up some space,
and manufacturers want to come out with new models every year,
and according to uh Adam Burakowski of Wirecutter, large appliances
are kind of a an exception. You rarely see big,
significant markdowns on large appliances, but small appliances and televisions,
(09:54):
which can get pretty darn big these days, they can
get marked off quite a bit, and most lee in
order to make room for new models. Black Friday opened
up a chance for stores to offload older stuff, perhaps
at a discount, after sales had slowed down considerably, so
by the nineteen eighties, Black Friday was established as the
formal beginning of the holiday shopping season, and while some
(10:17):
online service providers like compu Serve would introduce online shopping
in the nineteen eighties, it was a far distant second
to shopping in physical stores. It had barely registered. It
really wasn't until the mid nineteen nineties when Netscape one
point oh incorporated the Secure Socket Layer Protocol the SSL protocol.
(10:41):
That's when online transactions could be considered truly secure for
the first time. That led to the possibility of turning
the Internet, and specifically the Web, into a commerce destination.
Sites like Amazon and eBay helped usher in a new
era of commerce, making it practical and then desirable to
(11:02):
shop online. While those two sites saw a lot of success,
the early days of e commerce also saw a lot
of businesses rush into that space without really forming a
strategy around it. After the dust would settle in the
wake of the dot com bubble implosion in the early
two thousand's, companies began to take a more measured approach
and e commerce started to come into its own. In
(11:24):
two thousand five, a marketing team led by Ellen Davis
at a company called shop dot Org introduced the concept
of cyber Monday. This would be e commerce's response to
Black Friday, the sales pitch road itself. Why would you
leave your comfortable home and brave potentially bad weather and
(11:44):
guaranteed terrible traffic to fight your way into a store
only to find out that the thing you wanted to
buy has already sold out. Why risk getting hurt or
worse as single minded consumers shove and elbow and kick
their way to get the last tickle me Elmo doll
(12:04):
or whatever must have items happened to be on sale
that year. Why not instead sit at home and order
your holiday gifts online and have them either delivered to
you or even to the people you plan to give
gifts to. You take out the whole step of having
to take the gifts to the people. Cyber Monday was born.
(12:26):
I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, the
concept of cyber Monday didn't just arrive out of the blue.
For a few years leading up to two thousand five,
(12:47):
analysts had seen a boost and online line sales on
the Monday following Black Friday. They had seen this trend
happening so maybe some people were late to the game
and they weren't able to land a deal on Black Friday.
Maybe some of them weren't able to get hold of
that must have item in a physical store, so now
(13:08):
they were looking online. But whatever the reason, by two
thousand five, Cyber Monday was one of the busier online
shopping days of the year, but not the busiest, in fact,
not even in the top ten. By two thousand five,
it was more like the twelfth most popular shopping day
online at that point. But the Cyber Monday marketing idea
(13:30):
would change that. So the media, here's about this idea
in two thousand five, and they jump all over this
concept of Cyber Monday. And this is no surprise. News
about sales tends to get a lot of attention, whether
it's in print, audio, or television spots. You've probably seen
(13:50):
countless articles and videos that lists the biggest Black Friday
or Cyber Monday deals. There's a whole industry around this.
There are groups that start putting out information about it
before November even starts to talk about the big Black
Friday or Cyber Monday deals that are coming down the line.
So media outlets were highly motivated to take this new
(14:13):
concept and to run with it. Online retailers would get
on board too, because the media coverage amounted to free
publicity and they started to see their sales increase. So
two thousand five was a good start. Analysts estimated the
online retailers saw about four eight four million dollars in
sales collectively on that Monday that year. But the retailers
(14:36):
would prepare themselves to really push for it in a
big way in the years to follow. By creating promotions
and sales tied to this concept of cyber Monday, they
could actually increase sales dramatically over a typical shopping day online.
In two thousand and six, CNN ran a story that
(14:59):
point it out that certain sought after items were being
really scarce in brick and mortar stores but were available online.
The article had the title, for e tailors, It's Cyber Monday,
and it had a subheadline that said traffic tracking services
showed a fifty increase in Internet traffic at various online
(15:21):
commerce sites on that Monday. The sought after items included
stuff like the PlayStation three gaming console from Sony, Nintendo's
we gaming console, and the aforementioned Elmo, though this one
was the Tickle Me Elmo t m X. And by
the way, just as a side note, I actually watched
(15:41):
a video of that Elmo toy for this podcast because
I'm nothing if not thorough in my research, and I
didn't remember this toy. That's why I was like, what
is the tickle Me Elmo t MX? How is that
different from the Tickle Me Elmo, which was a doll
that would laugh and vibrate like crazy whenever you activated it.
So in the video I saw Elmo as a toy
(16:05):
that could stand up. Is is actually standing and you
would activate it by pressing certain points on the doll
and it would start to laugh and it moves its
arms and eventually it bends over like it's laughing so
hard it can't stand up straight. It falls over onto
the ground, and then ultimately at the end of this
it stands itself back up. The best part about this
(16:26):
story is while I was watching this, my coworker Noel Brown,
who's one of the hosts of Ridiculous History, walked up
behind me and he asked me what the heck was
I watching. Although he didn't use those words, he he
was a bit more coarse in his language, but upon
explaining it, he shook his head and walked away. That's
the typical response I get here at the office. In
(16:46):
two thousand seven, online sales were up to seven hundred
thirty million dollars. Then, in December two thousand seven, the
United States entered what was later called the Great Recession.
This was when real estate market collapsed, which in turn
made mortgage backed securities issued by banks to fall in
(17:06):
value dramatically, and that in turn threatened the solvency of
various financial institutions like those banks that led to the
government bailouts of banks and businesses began laying off workers
and eliminating jobs. It doubled the unemployment rate in the
United States until it hit ten percent. Now, the reason
I mentioned all of that is because, despite this economic downturn,
(17:31):
online retailers would see a year over year increase in
sales from two thousand seven to two thousand eight two
thousand seven seven thirty million dollars two thousand eight, eight
hundred forty six million dollars despite the economic downturn. Now,
one possible reason for the higher number is that people
(17:52):
weren't just looking for a good deal in two thousand eight,
they needed good deals. People still wanted to buy presents
for friends and family, but money was tight, so sales
were more important than ever. An online seemed to give
the biggest access to those sales. The holiday season in
two thousand eight also saw a rising battle between traditional
(18:13):
retailer Walmart an online giant Amazon. Amazon would take the
number one spot according to traffic tracking services, with an
increase of twenty one percent more traffic year over year. Walmart,
by comparison, only saw a six percent increase. More importantly,
for Amazon, it became the most popular online destination for
(18:37):
commerce on Cyber Monday. In two thousand nine, com Score,
which is a data analysis firm, published a report that
said forty one point six percent of all online shoppers
were logging in from home, but fifty two point nine
percent were logging in from work. So maybe that don't
want to go to work itis bubonic plague that prompted
(18:59):
that initial article that gave us the term Black Friday
for the day after Thanksgiving, maybe that now extends to
everyone on the following Monday. They might be at work,
but instead of actually working, they could be scouring the
internet for the best deals in lowest prices, same as
it ever was. I guess Walmart would strike back against
(19:21):
Amazon in two thousand nine when when it announced cyber
Week and set the chorus for things as they are now.
This extended the sales that Walmart was showing off for
a full week following Thanksgiving. That would prompt other retailers
to follow suit in and would also be when Cyber
(19:43):
Monday would become the busiest online shopping day of the year,
and it's been that way ever since. Was also the
first year that Cyber Monday sales would top one billion dollars.
But just to put things into perspective, that same year
saw shoppers visit real world stores to the tune of
ten point seven billion dollars in sales, So cyber Monday
(20:07):
was a big success, but it was still trailing far
behind Black Friday and traditional stores. The next year in
c NBC rather predictably reported that Black Friday and Cyber
Monday had effectively gloamed together to create this mutated beast
of a long shopping weekend, and we were starting to
(20:28):
see sales extend further out in both directions from Black Friday.
While this also had the effect of cannibalizing some of
the sales on Friday and Monday themselves. Ultimately, I'm pretty
sure merchants don't really care when they're selling stuff. They
just care if they are selling it and how much
they're able to sell. In two thousand twelve, we would
(20:49):
see another shift in consumer behavior, one that would shape
the way retailers would target customers. More shoppers, nearly twenty
percent of them began to smartphones to look at cyber deals.
This was a twelve percent increase from the previous year
and also an indication that mobile browsing was the future.
(21:09):
And this, by the way, was something the entire online
content world was starting to realize. Right around this point.
Anyone who worked in that world, such as yours truly
was starting to think about ways to optimize content for
the mobile experience. It was clear that companies that could
make their online experience a positive one, no matter what
(21:30):
sort of device someone might use to access it, would
be well ahead of the game. That included e commerce sites,
which began to invest more money in creating user interfaces
for their stores, specifically for smartphones. In all, consumers spent
one point four six five billion dollars in online shopping
(21:50):
on Cyber Monday. In two thousand twelve, electronics, computer hardware,
and video games all experienced huge jumps in sales gains
year over year, but the top performing category according to
com Score was in digital content and subscriptions. Also by
two thousand twelve, there was a pretty much even split
(22:10):
between people buying stuff while surfing the web from home
and those who were still on the clock at work.
In two thousand thirteen, fashion websites began to finally get
in on this Cyber Monday game. Clothing retailers like Old
Navy started to launch their own Cyber Monday deals, taking
advantage of the same shopping frenzy as other retailers. And
this actually reminds us that one of the values of
(22:33):
these days, both Black Friday and of Cyber Monday, to retailers,
in large part is due to the fact that we
as consumers have been conditioned to shop on those days.
So many people are already in a mindset to go
out there and get ready to buy stuff, and by
leveraging that from the retail side and pairing a good
(22:53):
deal or two to take advantage of it wherever you can,
just makes really good business sense. In two thousand fifty,
Target announced it was offering up a fifteen percent discount
across all of Target dot Com for Cyber Monday, showing
that the big retail businesses were really playing serious at
this point and in things would really go crazy as
(23:15):
the concept of cyber Week took hold for more retailers.
I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's
take another quick break to thank our sponsor so In.
According to calm Score, retailers saw eleven billion dollars in
(23:38):
sales during cyber Week. Now that started on Monday, November
and it ended on December four. Cyber Monday itself accounted
for nearly two point seven billion dollars in sales all alone.
And not only that, but starting on Thanksgiving Day, e
commerce sites collectively saw more than one billion dollars of
(23:59):
sales every day for eleven days straight. It drove the
holiday season sales, which combs scored defined as starting on
November one and indig on December four, to achieve nearly
thirty eight billion dollars in sales. That's a ton of money. Also,
in twenty sixteen, one two million people in the United
(24:22):
States did some online shopping on cyber Monday. But on
Black Friday only one hundred sixteen million Americans did any shopping,
and that includes sixty seven point nine million people who
were doing online shopping. So in twenty sixteen, cyber Monday
pulled ahead of Black Friday as the busiest shopping day
(24:44):
in the United States and all without having to line
up in front of a store at three in the morning.
In comm Score reported that consumers spent three point three
six billion dollars on Cyber Monday from usk top computers,
so just from desktops. According to the Verge, purchases made
(25:06):
from mobile devices accounted for another two billion dollars in sales.
And according to multiple sources, although this doesn't really match
up with the com Score numbers, the collective cyber Monday
sales efforts in twenty seventeen amounted to six point five
nine billion dollars in sales. Now, if you look at
the sales figures from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online sales
(25:29):
amounted to nineteen point six to billion dollars, truly an
enormous sum of money. Now. According to a survey from
National Retail Federation as well as a company called prosper
Insights and Analytics that partnered to make this survey. Fifty
eight million Americans chose to do their holiday shopping online,
(25:51):
only fifty one million chose to shop only at physical stores,
and more than sixty four million Americans did some combination
of the two. So while online shopping has definitely pulled
ahead of going to actual brick and mortar stores, there's
still a place for those physical shops. They are not obsolete.
(26:13):
People are still shopping there in droves, just they're doing
it more online. The Wall Street Journal reported that brick
and mortar stores did see a decrease of about four
percent in the number of people visiting those stores in
compared to the same time in so we are seeing
fewer people going to these stores. It's not quite to
(26:34):
the point where I would want to try and go
out on Black Friday. I think there's still way too
many people out there, but we're getting there now. There
is a growing concern that by extending these deals out
from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the whole Cyber week thing,
and the Black Friday sales that start two weeks before Thanksgiving,
that these sales are going to lose their luster, and
(26:56):
again part of what drives so much sales activity are
the limitations around the sales dates. If you make items
available only for a limited time at a lower price,
it drives up consumer interest and it encourages shopping. You
just introduced that idea in a customer's head that the
thing that kind of sort of wanted is only going
(27:18):
to be at a discounted price for a short while,
and then you're more likely to move them to actually
buy that thing. But if you extend the sale out,
you make it less special. You dilute that effect to
some extent, and the danger is that ultimately you'll start
to see sales slow down or worse yet, decline as
a result, because people don't feel compelled to go out
(27:41):
and buy that thing because it's been marked down. As
for what is driving the popularity of online shopping, a
lot of it is opportunity. More people have access to
getting online than ever before, and for many people, working
at a computer is part of their job, so they
can easily access us these deals whether they're at work
(28:02):
or at home. For other people, a smartphone and a
credit card is really all they need to get some
shopping in, So even if employees are limiting their online shopping,
just times when they're on break and they're not actually
trying to snag a deal on the company dime. You
would still expect to see growth in this field, just
because we're seeing more penetration in computer access and internet access.
(28:25):
The National Retail Federation predicts that in retailers will see
an increase in sales between four point three percent and
four point eight percent. That's actually a step down from
the increase in twenty seventeen that was at five point
five percent. Over the figures, but it still means that
we're going to see more sales this year, and it
(28:47):
would mean that the entire holiday season, not just Black
Friday and Cyber Monday, but during the course of the
holiday season, we will see sales between seven hundred seventeen
point five billion dollars and seven point nine billion dollars,
getting close to a trillion dollars in sales over the
(29:09):
holiday season. That is crazy. So now let's get down
to brass tacks. How do you find good deals? Well,
like I mentioned earlier, deals are happening before and after
Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so those days don't really
matter as much in the grand scheme. Of things. By
the time you are listening to this episode, on the
(29:31):
day that it publishes, deals are already going on. Amazon
typically leads the charge, and I imagine part of this
strategy is that they're trying to head off all the
retailers at the past. They're trying to get ahead of them,
get ahead of Black Friday, because there's a limited amount
of money out there. Right, Shoppers are only going to
spend so much this year, so Amazon wants to get
(29:55):
ahead of all the other deals to get as much
of those dollars as it possibly can. That's the deal
with business, right. Online sales are actually best on Thanksgiving Day,
typically with an average discount of twenty Categories of stuff
that tends to have the biggest discounts on Thanksgiving Day
(30:17):
include things like sporting goods, computers, video games, and clothing.
So if you're shopping for any of those things, set
aside some time on Turkey Day to pop online and
check out some deals. But if you want to buy
something like a television or a tablet, computer, or maybe
a small appliance, your best bet for the biggest discount
online is actually Black Friday, not Cyber Monday. But there's
(30:41):
no need for you to jump in a car and
head to the local mall, you just go online. Online
sales tend to be best for those items. On the
old traditional shopping day, Cyber Monday is still great for
a lot of different deals, but if you're really in
the market for something new, or you're looking to save
the most money on gifts thanksgiving him, Black Friday, or
when you should pop open the computer and hunt around
(31:03):
a bit. It's also a great idea to do some
research on the various items that are for sale. You
might find that the discounted items are ones that are
not really the best in their class. They might lack
some interesting features. This happens a lot with television's. You'll
see a lot of TVs get marked way down. Then
if you do a little research, you might find out, oh,
(31:25):
well that's because that television doesn't have a particularly high
resolution or it's got a lot of limited features. And
then you realize, well, yeah, I could buy a television
for super cheap, but it's not necessarily a good TV.
So you want to do that research. And just because
something is being sold at a big discount doesn't always
mean it's worth buying. Also, it's not a bad idea
(31:48):
to look around to see what the price history was
of certain items. Every now and then a retailer will
mark up an item just before a big sale, and
that way, when they put in the discount, the sale
price is really not that different from the original price
(32:08):
of the item. It could be that in October you
could have bought something for five dollars, and then going
into November it gets marked up to six dollars, But
then the discount means that they're selling it for four
seventy five dollars, So it looks like a bigger discount
because the original price appears to have been six hundred,
(32:28):
But if you go back just a little further, you
see that the price was lower earlier. Just be careful.
Sometimes that deal that's too good to be true is
too good to be true. Online holiday sales tend to
feature pretty good deals leading all the way up to
Green Monday. Now, Green Monday is the second Monday in December,
and it's just ten shipping days out from Christmas Day,
(32:51):
meaning if you wait any longer, you may not have
enough time for your order to get to you before
the gift giving festivities occur in That day falls on
December ten, and the name Green Monday actually comes from
the site eBay. eBay coined the term green Monday in
two thousand seven. That was after they had noticed that
(33:15):
this particular Monday had some of the highest sales of
the year. In fact, it was the busiest online shopping
day for quite some time. Cyber Monday would pass Green
Monday in two thousand nine during the Great Recession, and
then Cyber Monday would ultimately become the busiest online shopping
day and Green Monday would fall quite a bit. But
(33:37):
it's still very popular online shopping day. In fact, now
I think it's climbed back up to number two. It
was down in its number five for a while, but
I think it's back up to number two at this point.
So until Green Monday, you're likely to see some pretty
good deals online. And that is the history and evolution
of cyber Monday. Again, it's some combination of marketing, some
(34:02):
combination of psychology, some combination of just trying to capitalize
on already established consumer habits. It's good to know all
of these elements because it informs you before you start
making decisions on what you're gonna buy and who you're
going to buy it from. Also, small Business Saturday is
(34:23):
still a thing, and I still really like it. I
like supporting small local businesses when I can, because you
can get some really unique stuff. I know that that's
redundant to say really unique, but you can get stuff
that you can't find anywhere else from a lot of
small businesses, and you support people who are working really
hard to keep those businesses going. And might mean paying
(34:44):
a little more for the gift, but it also probably
mean the gift means a little more, so it all
evens out right. I hope you enjoyed that episode about
the history of cyber Monday, and uh, if you are
hunting for deals, I hope that you find them. Keep
it mind this year is, like last year, very challenging.
They're still supply chain issues all around the world. So
(35:08):
my recommendation is, don't have your heart set on any
specific product unless you just happen to know it's in
stock somewhere that you can get it. Uh, and you know,
keep your keep your options open, and keep be patient
because there are a ton of people out there trying
desperately to get things on track, but there are a
(35:28):
lot of factors that are making it complicated for products
to get to customers, and UH, as long as we
keep that in mind, and we keep in mind that
the most important thing is to let the people we
love know that we love them and that hopefully they
appreciate that, I think we'll get through it. Also, I mean,
(35:48):
if you can, it's always good to shop locally and
support your local artists and crafts people and you know,
the folks who make stuff in your community. UH as
the biggest impact if you can do that. I realized
not everyone is in a place where that's a possibility,
but if that's an option, I highly recommend looking into it.
(36:10):
I know that for me, getting something that's like from
a local crafts person has a lot more meaning than
say a PlayStation five. Um, but if you have an
extra PlayStation five, I'll take it because I can't find
one of those anywhere. Okay, So that wraps up this episode.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me.
(36:32):
The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
handle for the show is text Stuff H s W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(36:53):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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