November 21, 2018 • 35 mins
What is Black Friday, and how did it spawn Cyber Monday? From business trends to marketing schemes, we take a look at the history of holiday shopping online.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer and
I love all things tech, and today I thought i'd
change things up a bit and talk about the history
and evolution of cyber Monday. So where did this come from?
(00:29):
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 cyber Monday, there was Black Friday, both
in the sense that Black Friday as a thing is
older than cyber Monday, and also cyber Monday is the
(00:50):
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 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
(01:12):
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 early as it can, which
means November. The latest it can fall in the month
is November. Anyway, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving
(01:36):
in the United States. Now, there is an apocryphal story
that says the origins of Black Friday are deeply racist
and tied to the United 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
(01:56):
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 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
(02:19):
think of them as being particularly altruistic. However, we can
put that whole explanation aside. Anyway, 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
(02:42):
earlier version of Black Friday, though that was not the
day after Thanksgiving. That Black Friday wasn't associated with a
holiday at all, but rather with a stock market crash
that happened on Friday, September twenty four, eighteen sixty nine.
The cause of that crash was that there were two
speculators named Jay Gould and James Fisk, and together they
(03:06):
were able to drive up gold prices way 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
(03:30):
as much gold as they could, and that 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 millions of dollars of gold to be made
available on the market, and that caused prices to crash.
(03:51):
Suddenly there was way more supply, and this crash ended
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
(04:13):
turning out better than it otherwise would have. The earliest
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
(04:35):
for workers to call in sick the day after Thanksgiving,
and really they were just trying to make a long
weekend out of the holiday because at that time it
was 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
(04:58):
by workers across the nation and to the bubonic plague
also 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.
(05:18):
This would come out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The local police
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
(05:42):
was beginning to be associated and has been since 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 blacks Saturday because
of the headaches that came along with all that busy shopping,
(06:04):
mostly in the form of stuff like traffic 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
(06:26):
new version of the history of Black Friday popped up,
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
(06:49):
or operating in the red in other words, and push
them towards profitability or operating in the black. Thus, black
Friday now that refers to the practice of noting 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
(07:13):
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.
(07:36):
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
(07:57):
for a very short time, or the inventor or 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
(08:18):
ticket items 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
(08:38):
small appliances and televisions, which can get pretty darn big
these days, they can get marked off quite a bit,
and mostly 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,
(09:02):
and while some 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
(09:24):
Protocol the SSL protocol. 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
(09:46):
and then desirable to 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 thousands, companies began to
take a more measured approach and e commerce started to
(10:08):
come into its own. In 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 guaranteed terrible traffic to fight
(10:33):
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 or whatever must have item
happened to be on sale that year. Why not instead
(10:55):
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. I'll explain more in
just a moment, but first let's take a quick break
(11:16):
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, analysts had seen
a boost and online line sales on the Monday following
(11:39):
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 they were
looking online. But whatever the reason, by two thousand five,
Cyber Monday was one of the big easier online shopping
(12:01):
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
would change that. So the media, here's about this idea
in two thousand five, and they jump all over this
(12:23):
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
countless articles and videos that lists the biggest Black Friday
or Cyber Monday deals. There's a whole industry around this.
(12:44):
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
concept and to run with it. Online retailers would get
on board too, because the media coverage amounted to free publicity,
(13:07):
and they started to see their sales increase. So two
thousand five was a good start. Analysts estimated the online
retailers saw about four d eighty four million dollars in
sales collectively on that Monday that year. But the retailers
would prepare themselves to really push for it in a
big way in the years to follow. By creating promotions
(13:30):
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
pointed out that certain sought after items were being really
scarce in brick and mortar stores but were available online.
(13:54):
The article had the title for e tailors, It's Cyber Monday,
and it had a ub headline that said traffic tracking
services showed a fifty increase in Internet traffic at various
online commerce sites on that Monday. The sought after items
included stuff like the PlayStation three gaming console from Sony,
(14:15):
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 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,
(14:37):
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 that could stand up is actually standing, and
you would activate it by pressing certain points on the
(14:57):
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 story is while I was watching this, my coworker
Noel Brown, who's one of the hosts of Ridiculous History,
(15:17):
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 two thousand seven, online sales were up to seven
hundred thirty million dollars. Then, in December two thousand seven,
(15:40):
the United States entered what was later called the Great Recession.
This was when the real estate market collapsed, which in
turn made mortgage backed securities issued by banks to fall
in value dramatically, and that in turn threatened the solvency
of various financial institutions like those banks, that led to
the government bailouts, and banks and businesses began laying off
(16:03):
workers and eliminating jobs. It doubled the unemployment rate in
the United States until it hit ten. Now. The reason
I mentioned all of that is because, despite this economic downturn,
online retailers would see a year over year increase in
sales from two thousand seven to two thousand eight two
(16:24):
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
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
(16:47):
were more important than ever, and online seemed to give
the biggest access to those sales. The holiday season in
two thousand eight also saw a rising battle between traditional
retailer walm Art an online giant Amazon. Amazon would take
the number one spot according to traffic tracking services, with
(17:08):
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
commerce on Cyber Monday. In two thousand nine, comm Score,
which is a data analysis firm, published a report that
(17:29):
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
that initial article that gave us the term Black Friday
for the day after Thanksgiving, maybe that now extends to
(17:53):
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
Amazon in two thousand nine when when it announced cyber
Week and set the chorus for things as they are now.
(18:16):
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
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.
(18:41):
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
was a big success, but it was still trailing far
behind Black Friday and traditional stores. The next year in
(19:02):
CNBC 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 see
sales extend further out in both directions from Black Friday.
While this also had the effect of cannibalizing some of
(19:22):
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
see another shift in consumer behavior, one that would shape
the way retailers would target customers. More shoppers, nearly twenty
(19:44):
percent of them, began to use smartphones to look at
cyber deals. This was a twelve increase from the previous
year and also an indication that mobile browsing was the future.
And this, by the way, was something the entire online
content world was star to realize. Right around this point,
anyone who worked in that world, such as yours truly
(20:06):
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
sort of the 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,
(20:30):
consumers spent one point four six five billion dollars in
online shopping 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.
(20:52):
Also by two thousand twelve, there was a pretty much
even split 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.
(21:16):
And this actually reminds us that one of the values
of 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
(21:39):
a good deal or two to take advantage of it
wherever you can, just makes really good business sense. In
two thousand fifteen, 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 ten things would
(22:00):
really go crazy as 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 com Score, retailers saw eleven
(22:22):
billion dollars in 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
(22:43):
one billion dollars of sales every day for eleven days straight.
It drove the holiday season sales, which comm Scored defined
as starting on November one and ending on December four,
to achieve nearly thirty eight billion dollars in sales. That's
a ton of money. Also, in twenty six one two
(23:07):
million people in the United 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
(23:27):
Friday as the busiest shopping day 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 desktop computers, so just from desktops.
(23:49):
According to the Verge, purchases made 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
comm score numbers, the collective cyber Monday sales efforts in
tweventeen amounted to six point five nine billion dollars in sales. Now,
(24:11):
if you look at the sales figures from Thanksgiving through
Cyber Monday, online sales 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
(24:35):
their holiday shopping online, 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
(24:56):
physical shops. They are not obsolete. People are still shopping
there and 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
(25:19):
these stores. It's not quite to 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
(25:40):
sales are going to lose their luster. And 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 and the customer's head that the thing that
(26:01):
kind of sort of wanted is only going 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
(26:24):
people don't feel compelled to go out 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
(26:46):
these deals whether they're at work 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 to 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
(27:07):
seeing more penetration in computer access and internet access. 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 sixteen figures, but it still means that
(27:30):
we're going to see more sales this year, and it
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 twenty point nine billion dollars,
(27:52):
getting close to a trillion dollars in sales over the
holiday season. That is crazy. So now let's get down
into 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
(28:15):
the time you are listening to this episode. On the
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
(28:37):
spend so much this year, so Amazon wants to get
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 four. Categories of
(29:00):
stuff that tends to have the biggest discounts on Thanksgiving
Day 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
(29:23):
online is actually Black Friday, not Cyber Monday. But there's
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
(29:43):
the most money on gifts Thanksgiving and Black Friday, or
when you should pop open the computer and hunt around
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
(30:06):
see a lot of TVs get marked way down. Then
if you do a little research, you might find out, oh, 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
(30:27):
is being sold at a big discount doesn't always mean
it's worth buying. Also, it's not a bad idea 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
(30:50):
really not that different from the original price of the item.
It could be that in October you could have bought
something for fives, and then going into November it gets
marked up to six hundred 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
(31:11):
price appears to have been six hundred, 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
(31:34):
just ten shipping days out from Christmas Day, 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.
(31:54):
eBay coined the term green Monday in two thousand seven.
That was after they had noticed that 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
(32:14):
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 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,
(32:36):
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 combination of psychology, some
combination of just trying to capitalize on already established consumer habits.
(32:58):
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 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
(33:20):
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 a little more for the gift,
but it also probably mean the gift means a little more,
so it all evens out right. If you, guys, I
want to buy a very special gift for someone, why
(33:42):
not look over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff.
That's our merchandise store that's not exactly a small business,
but every purchase does go to help our show and
we greatly appreciate it. If you have any suggestions for
future episode topics of tech Stuff, send me a message.
You can go to our website that is tech Stuff
podcast dot com and there you're gonna find all the
(34:04):
different means to contact me and let me know what
it is you would like me to talk about. Also,
do not forget. Tech Stuff has been nominated for an
I Heart Radio Podcast Award and votes are still coming in.
You can. You can go and vote every single day
if you go online and go to their website for
the I Heart Radio Podcast Awards. You can vote up
(34:26):
to five times a day. In fact, you can dedicate
all five of those votes to text stuff. We are
nominated in the Science and Technology category, so go check
that out. Look at the other shows that are nominated.
Throw your love around those shows deserve it, and I'll
talk to you again really soon. For more on this
(34:49):
and thousands of other topics because it has to works,
dot com one
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer and
I love all things tech, and today I thought i'd
change things up a bit and talk about the history
and evolution of cyber Monday. So where did this come from?
(00:29):
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 cyber Monday, there was Black Friday, both
in the sense that Black Friday as a thing is
older than cyber Monday, and also cyber Monday is the
(00:50):
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 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
(01:12):
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 early as it can, which
means November. The latest it can fall in the month
is November. Anyway, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving
(01:36):
in the United States. Now, there is an apocryphal story
that says the origins of Black Friday are deeply racist
and tied to the United 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
(01:56):
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 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
(02:19):
think of them as being particularly altruistic. However, we can
put that whole explanation aside. Anyway, 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
(02:42):
earlier version of Black Friday, though that was not the
day after Thanksgiving. That Black Friday wasn't associated with a
holiday at all, but rather with a stock market crash
that happened on Friday, September twenty four, eighteen sixty nine.
The cause of that crash was that there were two
speculators named Jay Gould and James Fisk, and together they
(03:06):
were able to drive up gold prices way 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
(03:30):
as much gold as they could, and that 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 millions of dollars of gold to be made
available on the market, and that caused prices to crash.
(03:51):
Suddenly there was way more supply, and this crash ended
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
(04:13):
turning out better than it otherwise would have. The earliest
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
(04:35):
for workers to call in sick the day after Thanksgiving,
and really they were just trying to make a long
weekend out of the holiday because at that time it
was 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
(04:58):
by workers across the nation and to the bubonic plague
also 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.
(05:18):
This would come out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The local police
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
(05:42):
was beginning to be associated and has been since 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 blacks Saturday because
of the headaches that came along with all that busy shopping,
(06:04):
mostly in the form of stuff like traffic 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
(06:26):
new version of the history of Black Friday popped up,
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
(06:49):
or operating in the red in other words, and push
them towards profitability or operating in the black. Thus, black
Friday now that refers to the practice of noting 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
(07:13):
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.
(07:36):
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
(07:57):
for a very short time, or the inventor or 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
(08:18):
ticket items 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
(08:38):
small appliances and televisions, which can get pretty darn big
these days, they can get marked off quite a bit,
and mostly 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,
(09:02):
and while some 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
(09:24):
Protocol the SSL protocol. 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
(09:46):
and then desirable to 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 thousands, companies began to
take a more measured approach and e commerce started to
(10:08):
come into its own. In 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 guaranteed terrible traffic to fight
(10:33):
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 or whatever must have item
happened to be on sale that year. Why not instead
(10:55):
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. I'll explain more in
just a moment, but first let's take a quick break
(11:16):
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, analysts had seen
a boost and online line sales on the Monday following
(11:39):
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 they were
looking online. But whatever the reason, by two thousand five,
Cyber Monday was one of the big easier online shopping
(12:01):
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
would change that. So the media, here's about this idea
in two thousand five, and they jump all over this
(12:23):
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
countless articles and videos that lists the biggest Black Friday
or Cyber Monday deals. There's a whole industry around this.
(12:44):
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
concept and to run with it. Online retailers would get
on board too, because the media coverage amounted to free publicity,
(13:07):
and they started to see their sales increase. So two
thousand five was a good start. Analysts estimated the online
retailers saw about four d eighty four million dollars in
sales collectively on that Monday that year. But the retailers
would prepare themselves to really push for it in a
big way in the years to follow. By creating promotions
(13:30):
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
pointed out that certain sought after items were being really
scarce in brick and mortar stores but were available online.
(13:54):
The article had the title for e tailors, It's Cyber Monday,
and it had a ub headline that said traffic tracking
services showed a fifty increase in Internet traffic at various
online commerce sites on that Monday. The sought after items
included stuff like the PlayStation three gaming console from Sony,
(14:15):
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 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,
(14:37):
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 that could stand up is actually standing, and
you would activate it by pressing certain points on the
(14:57):
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 story is while I was watching this, my coworker
Noel Brown, who's one of the hosts of Ridiculous History,
(15:17):
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 two thousand seven, online sales were up to seven
hundred thirty million dollars. Then, in December two thousand seven,
(15:40):
the United States entered what was later called the Great Recession.
This was when the real estate market collapsed, which in
turn made mortgage backed securities issued by banks to fall
in value dramatically, and that in turn threatened the solvency
of various financial institutions like those banks, that led to
the government bailouts, and banks and businesses began laying off
(16:03):
workers and eliminating jobs. It doubled the unemployment rate in
the United States until it hit ten. Now. The reason
I mentioned all of that is because, despite this economic downturn,
online retailers would see a year over year increase in
sales from two thousand seven to two thousand eight two
(16:24):
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
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
(16:47):
were more important than ever, and online seemed to give
the biggest access to those sales. The holiday season in
two thousand eight also saw a rising battle between traditional
retailer walm Art an online giant Amazon. Amazon would take
the number one spot according to traffic tracking services, with
(17:08):
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
commerce on Cyber Monday. In two thousand nine, comm Score,
which is a data analysis firm, published a report that
(17:29):
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
that initial article that gave us the term Black Friday
for the day after Thanksgiving, maybe that now extends to
(17:53):
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
Amazon in two thousand nine when when it announced cyber
Week and set the chorus for things as they are now.
(18:16):
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
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.
(18:41):
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
was a big success, but it was still trailing far
behind Black Friday and traditional stores. The next year in
(19:02):
CNBC 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 see
sales extend further out in both directions from Black Friday.
While this also had the effect of cannibalizing some of
(19:22):
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
see another shift in consumer behavior, one that would shape
the way retailers would target customers. More shoppers, nearly twenty
(19:44):
percent of them, began to use smartphones to look at
cyber deals. This was a twelve increase from the previous
year and also an indication that mobile browsing was the future.
And this, by the way, was something the entire online
content world was star to realize. Right around this point,
anyone who worked in that world, such as yours truly
(20:06):
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
sort of the 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,
(20:30):
consumers spent one point four six five billion dollars in
online shopping 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.
(20:52):
Also by two thousand twelve, there was a pretty much
even split 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.
(21:16):
And this actually reminds us that one of the values
of 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
(21:39):
a good deal or two to take advantage of it
wherever you can, just makes really good business sense. In
two thousand fifteen, 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 ten things would
(22:00):
really go crazy as 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 com Score, retailers saw eleven
(22:22):
billion dollars in 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
(22:43):
one billion dollars of sales every day for eleven days straight.
It drove the holiday season sales, which comm Scored defined
as starting on November one and ending on December four,
to achieve nearly thirty eight billion dollars in sales. That's
a ton of money. Also, in twenty six one two
(23:07):
million people in the United 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
(23:27):
Friday as the busiest shopping day 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 desktop computers, so just from desktops.
(23:49):
According to the Verge, purchases made 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
comm score numbers, the collective cyber Monday sales efforts in
tweventeen amounted to six point five nine billion dollars in sales. Now,
(24:11):
if you look at the sales figures from Thanksgiving through
Cyber Monday, online sales 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
(24:35):
their holiday shopping online, 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
(24:56):
physical shops. They are not obsolete. People are still shopping
there and 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
(25:19):
these stores. It's not quite to 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
(25:40):
sales are going to lose their luster. And 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 and the customer's head that the thing that
(26:01):
kind of sort of wanted is only going 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
(26:24):
people don't feel compelled to go out 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
(26:46):
these deals whether they're at work 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 to 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
(27:07):
seeing more penetration in computer access and internet access. 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 sixteen figures, but it still means that
(27:30):
we're going to see more sales this year, and it
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 twenty point nine billion dollars,
(27:52):
getting close to a trillion dollars in sales over the
holiday season. That is crazy. So now let's get down
into 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
(28:15):
the time you are listening to this episode. On the
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
(28:37):
spend so much this year, so Amazon wants to get
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 four. Categories of
(29:00):
stuff that tends to have the biggest discounts on Thanksgiving
Day 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
(29:23):
online is actually Black Friday, not Cyber Monday. But there's
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
(29:43):
the most money on gifts Thanksgiving and Black Friday, or
when you should pop open the computer and hunt around
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
(30:06):
see a lot of TVs get marked way down. Then
if you do a little research, you might find out, oh, 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
(30:27):
is being sold at a big discount doesn't always mean
it's worth buying. Also, it's not a bad idea 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
(30:50):
really not that different from the original price of the item.
It could be that in October you could have bought
something for fives, and then going into November it gets
marked up to six hundred 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
(31:11):
price appears to have been six hundred, 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
(31:34):
just ten shipping days out from Christmas Day, 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.
(31:54):
eBay coined the term green Monday in two thousand seven.
That was after they had noticed that 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
(32:14):
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 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,
(32:36):
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 combination of psychology, some
combination of just trying to capitalize on already established consumer habits.
(32:58):
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 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
(33:20):
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 a little more for the gift,
but it also probably mean the gift means a little more,
so it all evens out right. If you, guys, I
want to buy a very special gift for someone, why
(33:42):
not look over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff.
That's our merchandise store that's not exactly a small business,
but every purchase does go to help our show and
we greatly appreciate it. If you have any suggestions for
future episode topics of tech Stuff, send me a message.
You can go to our website that is tech Stuff
podcast dot com and there you're gonna find all the
(34:04):
different means to contact me and let me know what
it is you would like me to talk about. Also,
do not forget. Tech Stuff has been nominated for an
I Heart Radio Podcast Award and votes are still coming in.
You can. You can go and vote every single day
if you go online and go to their website for
the I Heart Radio Podcast Awards. You can vote up
(34:26):
to five times a day. In fact, you can dedicate
all five of those votes to text stuff. We are
nominated in the Science and Technology category, so go check
that out. Look at the other shows that are nominated.
Throw your love around those shows deserve it, and I'll
talk to you again really soon. For more on this
(34:49):
and thousands of other topics because it has to works,
dot com one
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.