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Now that it seems nearly every human activity has a computer- or Internet-based equivalent (e.g., cybersex, e-mail, online chats), it should probably come as no surprise that even a concept such as Black Friday also has a digital counterpart, one dubbed Cyber Monday. Just as Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is supposedly the busiest brick and mortar shopping day of the year in the U.S., so Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) is supposedly the busiest online shopping day of the year. But even though Black Friday may be the day that the largest number of consumers traipse through malls and shopping centers to look at goods, it isn't really the highest-volume sales day (in terms of dollars spent) of the year. Likewise, although Cyber Monday might be a day when a lot of computer users pile onto the Internet to check out wares offered by online vendors, it isn't the day most of them are buying stuff online. In terms of overall online sales, Cyber Monday historically ranks as one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year. Certainly many, many consumers (including those who braved the Black Friday sales crush but didn't come away with the purchases they wanted, and those who didn't even try) hit the Internet that day to browse e-commerce sites, as the Thanksgiving holiday has ended, thoughts have turned towards Christmas, and people have returned to work (where many of them have more solitude and better Internet access than they do at home). But although e-shoppers may do a lot of looking and browsing and comparing and even a good deal of buying on Cyber Monday, they aren't placing nearly enough orders to make that day the year's #1 online sales day. So where did the concept of Cyber Monday as the busiest online shopping day originate? As BusinessWeek noted in 2005, the term was something created by a retailers association as a promotional scheme: Typically, the busiest real shopping day of the year occurs on the Saturday before Christmas, and the busiest e-shopping day takes place on a Monday or Tuesday a week (or two) before the week in which Christmas falls. (According to PayPal, the most popular cybershopping day in 2008 was not the Monday after Thanksgiving, but the second Monday in December.) Also, because more consumers now have high-speed Internet access at home, many of them no longer wait until they return to work on the Monday following the four-day Thanksgiving break to look for deals; instead, the day that generates the most web traffic to online retail sites is Thanksgiving Day itself, as avid shoppers use the Internet to plan their strategies for Black Friday weekend sales at brick and mortar stores: But the tide seems to be changing as Americans spend more time online. In 2016, American customers spent more than $3 billion on Cyber Monday, according to marketing blog Adobe Digital Insights, making it the biggest single day in online commerce (so far). Black Friday is still a contender, though — the day after Thanksgiving generated more than $650 billion in spending in the United States in 2016, up about 3.6 percent from the year before, including online sales. Super Saturday, for its part, was so successful that it was rolled into several days of sales and promotional events leading up to Christmas.In late November 2017, reports appeared that Cyber Monday had, as promised, become the single largest online shopping day of the year, with Americans spending a record $6.59 billion, up nearly 17 percent from the year before.
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