Drew is a published author who makes his business off writing about and mocking the idiosyncrasies and failure of the modern media. There are plenty of sites with rather sophomoric senses of humor (also see SomethingAwful) that have enormous amounts of quality content.
Additionally, from my time at TotalFark, the $5/month weeded out many of the reprobates, and the quality of discussion was much higher. This was five or so years ago, however.
Whether or not it has now become reality, I distinctly remember reading a few months after the term was coined and/or popularized that the concept was invented as a marketing gimmick.
According to Wikipedia: "In late 2005, after the holidays, ecommerce sites reported that the busiest shopping days usually were between December 5-15 in a given year. For 2005, the year the term Cyber Monday was coined, the busiest online shopping day of the year in the U.S. was actually December 12, two weeks after "Cyber Monday"."
According to the 2007 article from Snopes, in 2006 the largest online shopping day was December 13th and in general cyber Monday is the 12th busiest online shopping day.
Of course, "Black Friday" isn't really the biggest day for brick-and-mortar retail either. I think that honor usually goes to the Saturday before Christmas.
[..] things have gotten much worse. A friend of mine told me that when she worked at the local Staples, there was a family that would show up anytime anything was on sale, buy whatever the item maximum limit was, take them home, attempt to sell the items on eBay for a profit, and then later return anything they couldn't sell.
Worse? That's called arbitrage and it's been going on since the idea of commerce sprung up in human skulls. He seems to be passing a moral judgement on the practice but there's nothing wrong with it. If someone wants to spend their time buying, say, 10 laptops on sale at Best Buy for $299 and selling them on eBay for $349, that's (on the surface) an honest business, and gives people who don't want to go to the store an opportunity to buy at a price they still consider reasonable.
I think that his point is not that it's an unholy practice, but more so that, for general consumers, Black Friday isn't what it's portrayed to be.
It's one thing if a family wants to hop down to the local Best Buy after thanksgiving to see if they can find any good deals. It's another thing if that store is packed with people who had similar ideas.
It's a completely different thing if the store is made up entirely of professionals who have conducted advanced research, commissioned line placeholders, and are specifically targeting all the 'deals' for the purposes of arbitrage.
In other words, just because I like playing pickup basketball doesn't mean I'm morally opposed to professional ball. Additionally, it may be useful for me to know in advance that this weekend's "basketball in the park" day is actually a highly-competitive tournament.
I worked at comparison shopping engines for a few years (like Shopping.com) and I can assure you that Cyber Monday is NOT myth. Our traffic always exploded the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Likewise, I can anecdotally add that in implementing various analytics packages for a variety of ecom sites, I've noticed that Cyber Monday is a -very- notable bump in traffic that stands out clearly when you're looking over traffic from the past couple of years.
Was it like this before "Cyber Monday" was marketed as such? I have no idea, but there is definitely data out there to back this up. If you're an online retailer and you're not seeing a spike in traffic that day, you're doing something wrong.
I wasn't privy to any actual sales data when I worked at Amazon, but anecdotally it seemed that while there was a real, reasonable bump on "Cyber Monday", Black Friday itself was huge (it probably helped that we had Black Friday sales!) and so was Thanksgiving Day (when I guess families would talk about all the shopping they would do the next day when stores were open and take out their laptops to try and get an early start)
There were a lot of places that had "Cyber Monday" sales (i.e., they named them "Cyber Monday Sale!!!"); I racked up for Christmas and myself at a seriously reduced price (only one I remember was like 50-60% off everything at Marc Ecko).
Drew is a published author who makes his business off writing about and mocking the idiosyncrasies and failure of the modern media. There are plenty of sites with rather sophomoric senses of humor (also see SomethingAwful) that have enormous amounts of quality content.