Cyber Monday

History

Cyber Monday began as a name in search of a day. Shop.org, the online-retail division of the National Retail Federation, was looking for a way to promote internet shopping, settled on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and announced it in a press release dated November 21, 2005 that described Cyber Monday as "one of the biggest online shopping days of the year."

The observation underneath the name was real enough. Shop.org's 2005 eHoliday survey, conducted with BizRate Research, found that 77 percent of online retailers said their sales had risen substantially on the Monday after Thanksgiving the previous year. The explanation offered at the time was the office connection: more than a third of the 1,890 consumers surveyed said they would use internet access at work to shop. In 2005, with home broadband far from universal, a workplace connection was often the fastest one a shopper had.

What the name was not, by the account of the people who chose it, was a description of a record. Scott Silverman, Shop.org's executive director, told BusinessWeek that the term came out of a brainstorm, and that alternatives including Black Monday, Blue Monday and Green Monday were discarded along the way. "It's not the biggest day," he said. "But it was an opportunity to create some consumer excitement." The growth around it was not invented, though: comScore Networks expected American online sales for that November and December to rise 24 percent, to more than $19 billion.

That is an unusually honest founding document for a shopping holiday, and it is worth keeping in mind every November, when the day is described as a record that was discovered rather than a label that was applied.

How to observe

Treat the date as the arbitrary part and the prices as the thing to check. Because Cyber Monday was scheduled rather than discovered, there is no particular reason a given retailer's best online price of the year should land on it; many run the same promotion across the whole weekend, and some run it for a week.

If you want to read the day's own paperwork, both pieces are short. The Shop.org survey finding that prompted the name is quoted in CNN/Money's 2005 report, and Silverman's "It's not the biggest day" remark is in CBS News's coverage from the same week. Reading them is a good inoculation against the annual claim that the day is historically unprecedented.

It is also worth noticing what has quietly expired. The original rationale for the day was that work had faster internet than home. That stopped being true some time ago, and the day has outlived its own reasoning.