America has turned every holiday on its national calendar into an excuse for shopping, with Black Friday damn near cannibalizing Thanksgiving. But nothing compares to the online ordering orgy that is 11/11, China’s Singles’ Day, where $8 billion worth of crap has already been snapped up at deep discounts—and that’s just on sites owned by the ecommerce giant Alibaba.
That figure comes via Reuters, and it’s the biggest it’s ever been. Supposedly Singles’ Day was born back in the 1990s, but it’s morphed into the ultimate marketing stunt, the Hallmark holiday taken to its logical conclusion, an idea nurtured into a frenzy by Alibaba (which holds the copyright on the term “Double 11”). It’s basically just a really fucking big sale!
The company kicked things off in 2009, when they slashed prices and urged bachelors and bachelorettes to treat themselves. Since then, it’s spiraled into something like (ugh) “cyber Monday” but bigger and badder. Seriously, this is next-level stuff. It’s billed as an alternative to Valentine’s Day, but the execs at America’s chocolate and greeting-card companies should be ashamed to show their faces at the steakhouse (or wherever execs gather to crow about their successes), because Singles’ Day makes their annual bonanza look like a fucking joke. It’s genius, really—a day devoted wholly to people spending their disposable income on themselves. How did this not occur to some American Jack Donaghy decade ago?
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