BLACK FRIDAY & CYBER MONDAY

Thanksgiving, for many, marks the beginning of the holiday season. After that day, many people decorate their house, can no longer complain that it’s too early to play Christmas music, and go shopping for gifts for family, friends, and coworkers. Mistletoe, Christmas lights, and snow (y’know, if we had any in Georgia) usher in the golden months for businesses across America. It’s a time when traffic piles up, the economy peaks, and every store is advertising the best deals of the year. Free enterprise is thriving during this sentimental and very economically beneficial time, so, imaginably, industrial leaders have taken advantage of it for decades and continue to today, bringing in ever-increasing profits; the consumer tsunami that rushes stores during the winter months is so comparatively prolific that there are two holidays dedicated to it. You can hardly avoid them – Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I’ve known about Black Friday for a while, but only heard about Cyber Monday this year, as it is relatively new compared to the former. Black Friday dates back to the 1950’s and focuses on packing out retail stores, getting people up and out of the house to lure them into treat-filled stores; these hordes of consumers physically filling business and store buildings are called “doorbusters.” As technology advanced, however, and people transitioned to online shopping for convenience, Cyber Monday was born in 2005, around five decades after the primary commercial celebration. It’s the same concept, but people can cash in on those competitive deals from their own homes.  

Businesses do tend to prefer Black Friday as they want doorbusters; they want buyers inside the store as it produces more sales. Many more people wait until Monday to shop online, however; why go out on Friday when you could shop at work or at home and get the same deals, right? The thing is the deals online aren’t usually as good as they would be in the store; it costs them more to ship the items to the buyer, so they couldn’t be. Nevertheless, last year, Cyber Monday out-earned Black Friday by around $1.6 billion. Companies made their predictions: “Cyber Monday is projected to hit $7.9 billion by the end of the day, making it the largest online shopping day of all time in the U.S” (Adobe 1). This year, Black Friday brought in around six billion while Cyber Monday earned $7.9 billion. Regardless of the gap between the two, both of their earnings rise by more each year.

These next couple months, you’ll be flooded with advertisements and buying opportunities; sellers intend to get nineteen to twenty-five percent of their yearly retail sales during this time, and the holiday season could make or break every one of them. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, but businesses are still providing people with gifts, food, decorations, and more. Both eager buyers and prepared businesses will benefit from the two commercial holidays, and the economic growth provided by Black Friday and Cyber Monday will likely only continue climbing.