So Amazon dropped some news yesterday that I've been chewing on since it showed up in my RSS reader this morning (yes, I still use an RSS reader, don't @ me). They're calling it "Prime Day." One day, July 15th, apparently timed to land right around the 20th anniversary of Amazon.com actually going live, back in July of 1995. Twenty years. That's a long time for a website to still be the first place most of us type into the address bar when we need literally anything.
The pitch, as far as I can tell from the press release, is that Prime Day is supposed to be bigger than Black Friday. Not "as big as." Bigger. More deals than their biggest shopping day of the year, squeezed into 24 hours in the middle of July, when nobody is thinking about holiday shopping because it's 95 degrees out and the last thing on my mind is a waffle iron.
I'll be honest, my first reaction was pure cynicism. I've had Prime for about three years now (the $99-a-year kind, not the newfangled monthly option they rolled out this spring), and it stopped feeling like a shipping perk a while back and started feeling more like a subscription to Amazon being the default answer to every purchasing decision I make. Batteries? Amazon. Cat litter? Amazon. That weird phone case I needed at 11pm on a Tuesday? Amazon, two days later, no thought required. So a made-up holiday that exists to get people who already pay $99 a year to spend even more money feels a little like getting invited to a party thrown in your own house that you're also catering.
But then I kept reading, and fine, I get why they're doing it. Prime members already buy things constantly, that's the whole point of the membership. What Amazon actually wants out of a day like this isn't more purchases from people like me, it's new sign-ups. Every deal on Prime Day is a Prime-exclusive deal, so if you're not a member you either watch from the sidelines or you finally cave and hand over the $99. It's a pretty clean bit of engineering when you think about it that way. Not exciting engineering, but effective.
What I actually want to know, and what nobody at Amazon is going to tell us until after the fact, is whether the deals are going to be real deals or Black Friday-style theater, where half the "sale" prices got quietly marked up in June so they could get marked back down in July. I've been burned by that trick on other sites enough times that I'm automatically suspicious of any retailer announcing a sale this far in advance with this much marketing muscle behind it. A real deal usually doesn't need a three-week press cycle.
Unrelated tangent, but this is also making me think about how strange it is that a company can just decide a day matters now, and enough of the internet goes along with it that it becomes a thing. Black Friday at least has actual roots, even if they're kind of grim (department stores, the day after Thanksgiving, all of it). Cyber Monday was invented too, by the National Retail Federation back in 2005, and that one stuck around just fine and now everybody treats it like it's always existed. So maybe I'm wrong to be skeptical. Maybe in five years we'll all just accept Prime Day the same way, and nobody will remember it got cooked up in a conference room to hit a quarterly number.
I'll say this though, I'm almost certainly going to check what's on sale that day anyway, because that's the whole trick, isn't it. You don't have to believe in the holiday to participate in it. I've got a laptop bag that's falling apart at the zipper, and if it happens to show up at 30 percent off on July 15th, I'm not going to sit here on principle and let it stay full price out of spite toward a marketing department I've never met.
Anyway. Mark your calendars, I guess. July 15th. We'll see if it's actually Black Friday in July or just a Tuesday with more banner ads than usual.