Does Cyber Monday really exist?

Factual Questions
1

The media is making a big deal about “Cyber Monday,” the Monday after Black Friday. Supposedly, office workers return to their cubicles and use their high speed connections to shop online.

Now, this might have been more prominent in the early part of the 2000s when high speed connections were less common at home.

Still, with more restrictive policies in place at most workplaces and the reduced cost of high speed internet at home, is this another media myth?

2

I wondered about this, too. I’d never even heard of Cyber Monday.

It turns out that’s not surprising. The concept arose only a couple of years ago in 2005. The on-line compamnies, not wanting to be left out of the buying frenzy on the Day After Thanksgiving (Black Friday), put out news releases about “Cyber Monday” (they didn’t want to call it “Black Monday”), which the news outlets have dutifully picked up and passed along to us, as usual without a speck of context, or even admitting that there might be a context*. So they’ve been shilling this story.

As it turns out, Cyber Monday isn’t “the biggest internet shopping day of the year”, although I suspect that, by saying it is, they hope it will become that. Why you should confine your on-line Christmas shoopping to one day, I have no idea. Unlike Black Friday, where people have the time off to visit the stores, there’s no compelling reason not to do it anytime.

See the good article on Snopes:

  • ONe thing I HATE about the news media is that they’ll almost never admit that something new is something they don’t know about, so they’ll simply drop it on you without a word of explanation, and make you feel like an idiot for not knowing something so obvious that the media don’t feel a need to introduce or explain it.