Rerun: The History of Cyber Monday

than previous ones. And uh, I'm sure you all were very well aware of how that impacted Black Friday, with a lot of stores moving their sales up well into the middle of November to start, and then running them constantly in order to get those those you know, products moved when you know that you're not going to be able to do those like door buster sales of years past. Personally,

I'm thankful for that, not for the pandemic. I hate that, but I'm thankful that people would not get trampled upon in an effort to get one of six televisions that have been marked down, you know, or something that's good.

So I thought that since we had a holiday week previously, which means that while I'm recording this, I'm about to get ready for Thanksgiving, that we would listen to an episode I recorded and published two years ago in ten and originally published on November twenty one, The History of Cyber Monday, so that we could kind of get a understanding of where this phenomenon came from and why it exists. So enjoy this episode from the History of Cyber Monday. 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 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 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 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 twenty 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

turning out better than it otherwise would have. The earliest known reference to the day after things Giving being Black Friday dates to nineteen fifty one from a periodical titled Factory Management and Maintenance that 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, 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 by workers across the nation 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.

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 Frida Day 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 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 Black Saturday because of the headaches that came along with all that busy shopping, 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 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 or operating in the red in other words, and pushed 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 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 had to go along with it. Stores began holding big sales to bring more and more shoppers into their stores, 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 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 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 H. Tam 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, 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, 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 Protocol the SSL protocol. That's when online transaction 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

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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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 d eight 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 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. 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

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 a video of that Mo 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 TMX? 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 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, 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, 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 of banks and businesses began laying off 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 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 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 retailer Walmart and online giant Amazon. Amazon would take the number one spot according to traffic tracking services, with an increase of twenty one 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, 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 we're 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 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. 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. Ten 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 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 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 link 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 things would 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 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 one billion dollars of sales

every day for eleven days straight. It drove the holiday season sales, which combs scored defined as starting on November one and indian 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 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 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. 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 com Score numbers, the collective Cyber Monday sales efforts in 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 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, 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. 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 TWI so we are seeing fewer people going to 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 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 in a customer's head that the thing that 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 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 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 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 figures, but it still means that 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, getting close to a trillion dollars in sales over the 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 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 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 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 online is actually Black Friday. Not Cyber Monday, but there's no need for you to jump in a call are 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 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 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 can 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 count 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 really not that different from the original price 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 go. A m I 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. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode about the history of cyber Monday goes

into not just tech obviously, but economics. But then a lot of my topics do spill over into that because, as we have understood for a long time, tech does not exist in a vacuum unless it's a spacecraft in space, and then it then it does exist in a vacuum. I gotta come up with a better a better phrase. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed that episode, and we'll be

back with a new episode very soon. But I wanted to give you, guys something didn't want to skip a Monday, and I also didn't want to make super producer Tari have to work during a holiday because I mean, she deserves her time off, probably more than I do. So if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on the Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs 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, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.