So today's the day everybody with a GameStop preorder receipt is lining up for a PS4, and I want to say up front: not me. I've still got a stack of games from two years ago I haven't finished (Skyrim, I am looking at you), and $399 feels like a lot of money to spend on a box that's going to sell out anyway and be easier to find in January. Somebody I follow on Twitter has been posting photos of the line outside the Union Square Best Buy since about 9pm last night and honestly it just makes me tired. Good for them though.
What's actually been stuck in my head since Monday is a number: $5.75 billion. That's what Alibaba says it did in sales on November 11th — Singles' Day, which if you haven't run into it before is this Chinese pseudo-holiday built around the date 11/11, four lonely little ones in a row, that Alibaba turned into a shopping event roughly the way American retailers turned the day after Thanksgiving into Black Friday. Except bigger. A lot bigger. 35 billion yuan moved through Tmall and Taobao in a single 24-hour window, and something like 80% of the orders came in through mobile phones.
I keep coming back to that mobile number because it's the part that actually humbles me a little. I tried to buy a pair of headphones off Amazon on my phone two nights ago waiting for the subway and gave up halfway through entering my billing zip code for the third time because the page kept resetting the form. This is not a new complaint, I know, everybody complains about mobile checkout, but it's a genuinely different thing to complain about it in the abstract versus complain about it while a company on the other side of the planet is apparently processing tens of millions of transactions an hour without (as far as I can tell from the coverage) melting down. Alibaba built its own version of Black Friday from scratch, on infrastructure it also built mostly from scratch, in a market that didn't even have real credit card penetration a decade ago, and made the checkout flow work well enough that most of the money came through a phone screen. Most American retail sites in 2013 still make you feel like you're filling out a form for the DMV.
I don't think most people here have really clocked how big Alibaba is yet. It's not really a household name in the US the way Amazon or eBay is, and it won't be for a while probably, but the scale on display this week is the kind of thing that should be setting off alarms in a few boardrooms. Five billion dollars is more than double what Cyber Monday did total last year in this country, and Alibaba did it in one day, on one platform, mostly through phones, and mostly (from what I can tell) without a wave of "site is down" tweets. Compare that to basically every big US retail launch of the last few years, including, let's be honest, most console launches, which tend to come with at least a few hours of "servers are overwhelmed" apologies bolted on.
None of this is a knock on the PS4 specifically, to be clear — Sony's had a good run this fall between the reveal event back in February and pricing it fifty bucks under where everyone assumed the Xbox One would land. It's more that watching two "biggest shopping event" storylines happen in the same week, one built around scarce physical hardware in physical lines and one built around a number that's hard to even visualize, makes the hardware line feel a little bit like a relic. People standing outside in November so they can hand a store their credit card in person, while on the other side of the world the transaction volume of a mid-sized country's GDP just moved through a phone app.
Anyway. I'm not buying a PS4 today. I might buy those headphones eventually, assuming the checkout page decides to cooperate.