By: Melanie Hoffman
Two weeks ago was this year’s “Black Friday,” also known as the busiest shopping day of the year. The monday after Black Friday is known as cyber monday- which is the online equivalent of black friday, created as online shopping became more and more popular. one many wonder which is more popular, and if cyber monday has affected the in store revenues of black friday, since the same deals are usually available online.
With the current economy, many stores extended their online sales that were designated for cyber monday. Electronic stores like circuit city made the entire weekend of black friday a “cyber monday weekend” thus offering all of the great deals of cyber monday starting on friday morning and lasting all weekend long. This year’s online sales nearly tripled the in store revenues at some stores.
this shows how the trend of shopping online as increased greatly in the past years, and how cyber monday may be more popular than black friday, which had dominated for the past decade.
another point to bring up, is the fact that some people do not need a major sale day like black friday to get the great deals on merchandise. for many products, those prices are available on sites like amazon.com year round.
Personally, I have been looking to buy a new digital camera, and i waited to see the sales that black friday and cyber monday would offer, but ended up buying the camera i wanted off of amazon.com last week since it was cheaper normally than the black friday weekend sales.
do you think that in the future the major shopping weekend of black friday will become less popular as online shopping continues to become more popular with sites like amazon.com and ebay.com? or will the sales of the cyber monday weekend remain?
2 Comments
December 13, 2008 at 2:55 pm
It’s true that there is a shift in consumer trends. More people are using the internet to buy things because it’s faster, many times cheaper, and it is just a lot easier to do. There’s no need to drive toa store, look for a parking spot, search the entire store for what you want, and no waiting in long lines. The internet allows users to browse any merchandise they want, from any store, and its as simple as clicking a few buttons. No wonder more people are using the internet the buy items. It’s especially useful in college where we don’t have the option of going to different stores and bringing things back to our dorms. Instead, its much simpler to order it and walk over to Student Package services and walk a few blocks back to our rooms. However, like many other things, there’s a trade-off. Though we get the benefits of online shopping we also have to wait for items to arrive in the mail and more importantly, we leave ourselves open to online criminals each time we use our credit cards on these websites. We’ve been talking a lot about privacy, or lack thereof online. So we have to ask ourselves is the comfort of online shopping worth giving up some of our rights to privacy?
December 14, 2008 at 2:11 am
I whole-heartedly believe that Black Friday shopping should be considered a part of this generation’s cultural values. But the internet is gaining speed when it comes to Black Friday and shopping for cheap deals. I also wrote an post earlier on the same topic earlier in the semester and found statistics supporting that in-the-store shopping has decreased by about 10% in the past few years. Eventually I think that online cyber Monday will be considered the optimum way to go when looking for a deal and a cheap electronics!