Today is Cyber Monday for those of you who didn’t know. Why Cyber Monday and how did it get started?
Here is a short synopsis:
In 1961 The Philadelphia Police Department coined Black Friday to describe the massive crowds gathered in stores and on the streets to start their holiday shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. In the 1980’s retailers picked up the term to advertise their holiday sales and door busters. As time went on Black Friday became the single highest day for retail sales in the U.S. This lead to massive crowds, violence and sometimes injuries. Tragically in 2008 a Walmart employee was trampled to death on Black Friday. Three years earlier, the National Retail Association coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” when they saw a huge part of the population and sales occurring on the Monday after Black Friday. This told retailers that consumers were still shopping but this time online. And they were doing it at work! Back in 2005 most people had better internet connections at work than at home. This continued and escalated due to the simple fact that shoppers didn’t want to deal with the crowds, could shop sales and discounts easily online, and it was time efficient!
This year the NRA estimates Cyber Monday 2015 to top over 3 million in sales! Black Friday’s sales, in comparison has waned a little in the past few years but Cyber Monday sales continue to grow. Cyber Monday 2014 was the largest shopping day in history with over 2 Billion in sales…..19% of that was online shopping.
However, with any large amount of success and growth, there needs to be some tweaking of the system. It was just reported about an hour ago that Target’s online shopping site crashed due to the high traffic. But….as I write this, Target just reported that the “all systems are go”! Target’s RED dot is now GREEN!
Tomorrow is December 1st. If you are a renter, most payments have to be satisfied by the 1st of the month. I just hope as you enjoyed Cyber Monday that you remembered and didn’t throw caution to the Cyber Wind!
