Wikipedia Deep Dive

Cyber Monday

11 min read

In 2020, Americans spent $10.7 billion dollars online in a single day. Not spread across a week, not accumulated over a holiday season—one Monday. That Monday happened to fall during the first year of a global pandemic, when physical stores felt dangerous and delivery trucks became the new shopping carts. But the phenomenon didn't start there. It started with a clever observation about what people do when they return to work after Thanksgiving weekend.

The Monday After the Feast

Here's the thing about Thanksgiving weekend: people spend four days surrounded by family, eating turkey, watching football, and—crucially—window shopping. They browse the Black Friday chaos, mentally bookmarking items they want but don't feel like wrestling crowds to obtain. Then Monday arrives.

Back to the office. Back to their desks. Back to high-speed internet connections that, in the mid-2000s, were often faster than what people had at home.

Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation and Scott Silverman noticed this pattern in 2004. The Monday after Thanksgiving was consistently one of the biggest online shopping days of the year—the twelfth biggest, historically. Employees were settling back into their cubicles, opening their browsers, and buying all those things they'd spotted over the long weekend.

So on November 28, 2005, Davis and Silverman gave this behavior a name: Cyber Monday.

A Name in Search of a Holiday

The term "cyber" feels almost quaint now, a relic of the 1990s when we called the internet "cyberspace" and worried about "cyber cafés." But in 2005, it still carried a futuristic sheen. Cyber Monday sounded exciting, modern, digital—the perfect counterpart to the physical stampede of Black Friday.

Interestingly, someone else had tried to create an online shopping holiday two years earlier. Tony Valado, who worked for 1-800-Flowers, proposed something called "White Wednesday"—the day before Thanksgiving. The idea was that people could order gifts before the holiday chaos began. It never caught on.

Cyber Monday succeeded where White Wednesday failed for a simple reason: it described behavior that was already happening. Davis and Silverman didn't invent a new shopping day. They named an existing one.

The Work Computer Advantage

There's a delicious irony buried in Cyber Monday's origins. This massive economic event—billions of dollars in transactions—was built on the back of employees shopping on company time.

In 2009, a company called comScore (which tracks internet traffic and digital commerce) reported that more than half of Cyber Monday purchases were made from work computers. Fifty-two point seven percent, to be precise. Only about forty-two percent came from home computers, with the remaining six percent originating from international locations.

The company's chairman, Gian Fulgoni, put it diplomatically when he explained that workers were "continuing their holiday shopping from work" after the Thanksgiving weekend. He noted two possible motivations: taking advantage of Cyber Monday deals, or buying gifts "away from the prying eyes of family members."

That second reason is worth pausing on. Cyber Monday became, in part, a day when parents could secretly order presents for their children without little eyes peeking at the screen. The workplace, it turns out, offered a kind of privacy that home didn't.

The Numbers Tell a Story

Watch how Cyber Monday's sales figures evolved:

2014: $2.65 billion
2015: $2.98 billion
2017: $6.59 billion
2018: $7.9 billion
2019: $9.4 billion
2020: $10.7 billion

That's a fourfold increase in just six years. The 2020 figure—driven by pandemic-era online shopping—represented the biggest single online shopping day in American history.

But here's an interesting wrinkle: while total spending skyrocketed, the average order value actually declined. In 2014, the typical Cyber Monday purchase was $160. By 2017, it had dropped to $128. People weren't spending more per transaction—more people were making transactions. The shopping day had democratized, spreading from dedicated online shoppers to the general population.

Going Global

A marketing term coined in an American retail federation office somehow became an international phenomenon. But its journey across borders took some interesting detours.

Australia didn't adopt Cyber Monday directly. Instead, Australian retailers created "Click Frenzy" in November 2012—same concept, different branding. The launch was, to put it kindly, rocky. The Click Frenzy website crashed immediately. Major retailer David Jones ran a competing sale called "Christmas Frenzy" on the same day, fragmenting the market. It was chaos, but profitable chaos.

Canada came to Cyber Monday through currency markets, of all things. In 2008, the Canadian dollar reached parity with the American dollar, which meant Canadians could shop American websites without the usual exchange rate penalty. Canadian retailers, watching their customers' money flow south, started offering their own Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to keep those dollars at home. By 2011, eighty percent of Canadian online retailers were participating.

The Netherlands found that Cyber Monday aligned conveniently with Sinterklaas, a traditional Dutch celebration where people exchange gifts. The holiday, which honors Saint Nicholas, falls in early December—right around when Cyber Monday deals appear. Dutch retailers started promoting Cyber Monday in 2012, and it fit naturally into an existing gift-buying season.

India tried to create its own version in 2012. Google India partnered with major e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Snapdeal to launch the "Great Online Shopping Festival" on December 12th. Google called it "the first time an industry-wide initiative of this scale was undertaken" in India. Three years later, Google quietly announced the event wouldn't continue. Sometimes marketing terms travel well across cultures. Sometimes they don't.

Chile's Cyber Monday launched in 2011 with companies from the Santiago Chamber of Commerce. By 2015, it had grown to include eighty-five stores, nearly four hundred thousand transactions, and eighty-three million dollars in sales—a genuinely significant economic event for a country of eighteen million people.

The Relationship with Black Friday

To understand Cyber Monday, you need to understand its older sibling: Black Friday.

Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving—has been associated with shopping since at least the 1950s. The name might come from Philadelphia police officers describing the chaotic crowds that descended on the city, or from retailers finally moving "into the black" (turning a profit) after operating at a loss for most of the year. Both explanations circulate; neither is definitively proven.

For decades, Black Friday meant physical stores. Retailers would open early, sometimes at midnight, offering "doorbuster" deals on limited quantities to draw crowds. Lines formed in parking lots. Stampedes occasionally occurred. The whole thing had a frenzied, almost ritualistic quality—Americans celebrating their post-Thanksgiving bounty by fighting over discounted televisions.

Cyber Monday emerged as the online answer to this physical phenomenon. Where Black Friday rewarded those willing to camp outside and push through crowds, Cyber Monday rewarded those who stayed home (or stayed at work) and clicked. Same impulse, different medium.

The two shopping events now exist in tension and complement. Many retailers run deals across the entire period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, sometimes called "Cyber Week." The distinction between them has blurred as physical retailers have built online presences and online-first companies have experimented with pop-up stores.

A Calendar of Commercial Holidays

Cyber Monday didn't emerge in isolation. It's part of a broader ecosystem of manufactured shopping occasions that cluster around this time of year.

Small Business Saturday falls between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, encouraging shoppers to patronize local independent businesses rather than big-box retailers or online giants. American Express created it in 2010, and the United States Small Business Administration later recognized it officially.

Giving Tuesday arrives the day after Cyber Monday. It positions itself as an antidote to consumer excess—a day for charitable donations rather than purchases. The 92nd Street Y in New York and the United Nations Foundation launched it in 2012.

Green Monday typically falls on the second Monday of December. eBay coined the term in 2007 to describe what it identified as one of the best sales days for online retailers—far enough into December that holiday urgency has set in, but not so late that shipping becomes uncertain.

Super Saturday (sometimes called "Panic Saturday") is the last Saturday before Christmas. It captures procrastinators making final desperate purchases before time runs out.

There's also Buy Nothing Day, an anti-consumerist protest that falls on Black Friday. Participants commit to purchasing nothing for twenty-four hours as a statement against commercialization. It began in Canada in 1992 and spread internationally, though it remains a niche movement compared to the shopping holidays it opposes.

What the Mobile Revolution Changed

Remember that statistic about fifty-two percent of Cyber Monday purchases coming from work computers? That landscape has shifted dramatically.

In 2019, Cyber Monday mobile transactions totaled $3.1 billion. People weren't waiting until they reached their office desks anymore. They were shopping from their phones on the couch, on the train, in bed—anywhere, anytime. The high-speed work connection that originally drove Cyber Monday had been replaced by 4G and WiFi hotspots.

This shift didn't eliminate Cyber Monday, but it changed its character. The concentrated burst of office-hours shopping spread out across the entire day. The clear distinction between "home computer" and "work computer" purchases became meaningless when everyone carried a powerful computer in their pocket.

Payment Preferences Tell Their Own Story

A 2014 survey found that forty-six percent of Cyber Monday shoppers planned to pay with credit cards, while forty-three percent expected to use debit cards. That near-even split reveals something about the American relationship with holiday shopping.

Credit card users might be spreading costs over time, paying interest for the privilege of buying gifts now and settling up later. Debit card users are paying immediately, spending only what they have. The almost identical percentages suggest Cyber Monday attracts both planners and stretchers, the careful and the aspirational.

The remaining eleven percent presumably used other methods: PayPal, gift cards, or newer options like Apple Pay and Buy Now, Pay Later services, which have grown substantially since that survey was conducted.

The Broader Meaning

Cyber Monday is, on one level, simply a marketing term that retailers use to drive sales during a predictable shopping peak. There's nothing magical about the date, no natural reason why the Monday after Thanksgiving should be particularly significant for online commerce. The holiday was invented, named, and promoted into existence.

But the fact that it worked—that this invented holiday spread across the globe, generating tens of billions of dollars in transactions—tells us something about how modern commercial culture operates. Names matter. Timing matters. Creating a sense of occasion, even an artificial one, drives behavior.

Ellen Davis and Scott Silverman noticed a pattern and gave it a name. Retailers used that name to concentrate their marketing efforts. Media outlets covered the phenomenon, adding legitimacy. Consumers internalized the date as a "shopping day," adjusting their behavior to match the narrative. And the pattern reinforced itself, growing larger each year.

The pandemic year of 2020 proved both the resilience and the artificiality of the concept. With physical retail severely constrained, online shopping soared—and Cyber Monday posted its biggest numbers ever, even though the original rationale (high-speed office internet) had become irrelevant. The holiday had transcended its origins to become self-sustaining.

Where It Goes from Here

Cyber Monday faces an interesting future. Online shopping is no longer novel; it's the default for many consumers. The distinction between a "cyber" shopping day and any other shopping day grows blurrier each year. Some analysts have suggested that Cyber Monday will eventually merge into an extended holiday shopping season, losing its distinct identity.

Others argue that human psychology craves defined occasions, specific moments to act. As long as retailers concentrate their deals and marketing around Cyber Monday, consumers will respond. The date creates urgency, a deadline, a reason to buy today rather than tomorrow.

What started as an observation about workplace internet habits has become a global commercial phenomenon. It's a testament to the power of naming things, of turning scattered behavior into a coordinated event. Ellen Davis and Scott Silverman didn't create the Monday-after-Thanksgiving shopping surge. But by naming it, they made it real in a way it hadn't been before.

Every year, on a Monday that falls somewhere between November 26th and December 2nd, billions of dollars change hands in a single day. People buy gifts for loved ones, treats for themselves, deals they might not need but feel compelled to grab. And somewhere in the back of their minds, many of them know they're participating in something invented—a marketing term that became a tradition, a name that became a holiday, a pattern that became a phenomenon.

That's the power of a good name at the right moment. Cyber Monday.