So Cyber Monday happened yesterday, and the numbers are already out: Adobe's Digital Index people are saying $2.04 billion got spent online in the US in one day, up 8.5% from last year. Biggest online shopping day in US history, apparently. I say "apparently" because every single Cyber Monday since I started this blog back in 2011, somebody's analytics team has declared it the biggest ever, and honestly, of course it is. More people have broadband every year, more people own a phone that can check out on Amazon in four taps, more retailers bother building a halfway decent mobile checkout. It would be weird if it WASN'T a record. That's not insight, that's just a graph going up and to the right because time keeps happening.
What I actually want to talk about is my own Monday, because it was a small disaster and I think it says something about where "the biggest shopping day ever" actually happens, which is on tiny screens with bad wifi, not in some gleaming data center.
I had one thing I wanted: a Fire TV Stick, the little $39 dongle Amazon put out a couple weeks back. Not because I needed it, I already have a Roku from two Christmases ago that works fine, but because $39 felt like a number I could justify to myself at 9am with coffee not yet finished. I added it to my cart around 9:15. Went to check out. Card got declined. Not because anything was wrong with the card, my bank apparently flags any purchase over $30 made before 10am on a Monday as suspicious, which, fine, I guess that's their job, but it meant a phone call to an automated system that took eleven minutes to confirm I was in fact trying to buy a streaming stick and not laundering money through Amazon's marketplace.
By the time I got back to the site the "deal" price had reverted to regular price. Ten dollars gone, just like that, over a hold-music loop.
I also tried, later in the day, to get on Target's site to look at a coffee maker my sister wants for Christmas, and it was doing that thing where the page loads about 80% of the way and then just sits there, spinner going, nothing happening, for what felt like actual minutes. I don't know if that was Target's servers buckling under the traffic or my own connection being garbage, but either way it's the same story every single year around this time: retailers spend all this money on marketing to drive everyone to their site at the exact same hour, and then the site itself is the weak link. You'd think after however many Novembers of this, somebody in charge of infrastructure would get a budget increase that actually matches the marketing budget. Apparently not.
None of this stopped me from buying things, to be clear. I ended up getting the Fire TV Stick anyway around lunch, at full price, because I am, it turns out, exactly the kind of consumer these retail calendars are built around: mildly annoyed, slightly poorer, and still clicking "buy" by the end of the day. Adobe's report says a decent chunk of that $2.04 billion came off phones and tablets rather than desktops, and I believe it, because I placed my second attempt at the Fire TV Stick order from my phone, standing in my kitchen, while my laptop was still open on the desk twelve feet away doing nothing useful.
The thing nobody's numbers ever capture is the friction. Everyone reports the total spent, nobody reports the total abandoned because a fraud algorithm got twitchy or a page hung for ninety seconds. I'd genuinely like to see that number someday, the shadow total, all the carts that got built and then died because something dumb got in the way at exactly the wrong second. I'd bet it's bigger than the $2.04 billion that actually cleared.
Anyway, the Fire TV Stick is sitting on my desk in its box. I'll probably set it up tonight, mostly to see if the interface is any less clunky than the Roku's. Low bar, but here we are in December already, which still feels sudden every single year no matter how many Decembers I've lived through at this point.