Okay so I said I'd stay off the couch this year and just do everything online, and I mostly did, and now I've got the receipts (literally, my inbox is a disaster) to talk about how it actually went.
Cyber Monday numbers are still trickling in this morning but from what I'm seeing reported, a lot of retailers are calling yesterday the biggest online shopping day in history, north of $1.2 billion spent. I don't fully trust any single-day "biggest ever" claim because they say that basically every year, but the general shape of it tracks with what I saw in my own browser tabs. I had like eleven tabs open by 11pm Sunday night just refreshing Amazon and Best Buy waiting for stuff to go live.
The thing that struck me is how much of Cyber Monday this year was basically an Amazon Kindle Fire and iPad accessory bonanza. The Fire came out at $199 less than two weeks ago and it feels like every other deal email in my inbox had it front and center, either the device itself getting a token $15-20 off or a pile of cases and covers getting slashed to move volume. Target had a $15 gift card bundle thing going if you bought a Fire in store that carried into some of their online promos too. Whether that's a "deal" or just clever bundling, I don't know, but it worked on me for a case.
Black Friday in-store, by contrast, felt like it was mostly about TVs and doorbusters that required you to physically fight someone at 5am. I did not go. I went two years ago for a $10 DVD player deal that turned out to be a genuinely terrible DVD player, and I've never fully recovered from the experience of standing in a Best Buy parking lot at 4:45 in the morning in November. Never again. My cousin went this year for a 46-inch TV deal around $398 and said the line wrapped around the building by 9pm Thursday night, so people are still very much doing that ritual, doorbusters aren't dead. But the checkout lines and the whole logistics of it sound exhausting compared to me sitting in sweatpants clicking "buy now."
So did online top in-store this year? In terms of dollar totals, no, brick and mortar Black Friday still moves more total money, it's not close. But in terms of which one felt like the bigger event, the one people were actually talking about and screenshotting deal pages for, I'd say Cyber Monday won the mindshare battle this year in a way it maybe hasn't before. Part of that has to be the Fire and the general excitement around cheap tablets going into the holidays. Part of it is just that more people have decent home internet and don't want to deal with parking lots.
A few smaller things I noticed poking around yesterday:
- jQuery Mobile 1.0 finally hit stable release this month and you could tell some of these retail sites' mobile pages had a slightly different, snappier feel to them than last year's clunky mobile ports. Not universal, but noticeable on a couple sites.
- Everyone and their mother had a "free shipping no minimum" promo running, which after a few years of $25 or $50 thresholds felt almost aggressive.
- Newegg's deals were, as usual, better for actual computer parts than anything Amazon had, if you're into that sort of thing. I picked up a hard drive I definitely didn't need.
One gripe: half these "70% off" banner deals I clicked through to yesterday were 70% off some accessory nobody wants, like a $40 tripod, dressed up next to a genuinely good $50 off deal on something people actually want, so you scroll past six things before finding the one worth it. Deal fatigue is real by hour three of scrolling.
Anyway. My wallet is lighter, my Fire case arrives Thursday supposedly, and I regret nothing except maybe that hard drive.