Black Friday and Cyber Monday Shopping in the US

Black Friday

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. (Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday in November). Black Friday is supposed to be the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season. Black Friday is associated with traditional brick-and-mortar stores rather than online e-commerce stores. On this day, shoppers get out of bed early in the morning at 4am to catch holiday shopping bargains in super markets like Walmart, Kmart, Target, etc.. 🙂

At the time when accounting was done manually in books, red indicated loss and black indicated profit. Since the Friday after Thanksgiving made the shift from red to black (unprofitable to profitable) in the accounting books, the day is known as Black Friday.

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Black Friday is not really the busiest retail shopping day of the year. The busiest retail shopping day of the year in the United States usually has been the Saturday before Christmas.

Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately following Black Friday. Cyber Monday symbolizes a busy day for online retailers. On Cyber Monday, consumers would return to their offices after the holiday weekend, and make purchases online taking advantage of the fast broadband connections at work. After the long holiday, who would want to work, than chatting and shopping! Many customers redeems the gift certificates on Monday. Cyber Monday has now evolved into a significant marketing event.

Top Cyber Monday Retail Websites

According to comScore, Amazon.com was the most visited retail website on Cyber Monday with 26 percent gain in traffic year-over-year. Amazon.com is followed by Walmart.com, Target.com, Bestbuy.com and Circuitcity.com. Cyber Monday (26-Nov-07) saw $733 million USD in online spending, a 21% increase from last year and an 84% increase from the average daily online spending totals during the preceding four weeks. 44 percent of Monday’s web surfers hit up either a retail site or shopping engine. 60 percent of online Monday’s bargain hunters were shopping while at the office.

During the Cyber Monday this year, Yahoo Small Business was down for more than 12 hours, as the website couldn’t handle the traffic!

CyberMonday.com, which advertises holiday season promotions of online retailers lso experienced notable gains on Cyber Monday.

Check out retail news at Ananthapuri.com for daily updates. Also check out Black Friday and Cyber Monday in Wikipedia.