Singles' Day

Based on Wikipedia: Singles' Day

The World's Biggest Shopping Day Started as a Joke About Being Lonely

Four college students in a cramped dormitory in Nanjing, China, were bored of being single. It was 1993, and these young men—living in a dorm cheekily named Mingcaowuzhu, which translates roughly to "all single men"—decided they needed a holiday. Not to mourn their relationship status, but to celebrate it. They picked November 11th, written as 11/11, because each digit 1 looks like a bare stick standing alone.

That "bare stick" image matters more than you might think.

In Chinese internet slang, the term guānggùn—literally "bare stick" or "bare branch"—refers to an unmarried man. The visual is unmistakable: a single, solitary line with nothing attached. Four of them in a row? That's the perfect symbol for single people everywhere. What started as an inside joke among friends at Nanjing University would eventually become the largest retail event in human history, dwarfing America's Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

From Dorm Room to Global Phenomenon

For most of the 1990s, Singles' Day remained a quirky campus tradition. Students at Nanjing University would throw parties, organize blind dates, and generally revel in their unattached status. The celebration spread to other universities in Nanjing, then beyond, but it remained fundamentally what it had always been: a day for single people to commiserate and celebrate together.

Then came Daniel Zhang.

In 2009, the CEO of Alibaba—China's e-commerce giant, roughly analogous to Amazon in the United States—saw an opportunity. Zhang transformed Singles' Day from a social occasion into a 24-hour shopping extravaganza. The logic was clever: single people have disposable income and time, they're already online looking for entertainment, and November sits in a retail dead zone between China's National Day holiday in October and the Lunar New Year in late January or February.

The results were staggering. What began as a promotional gimmick became an economic force that would reshape global retail.

Numbers That Defy Comprehension

Let me give you some context for what Singles' Day has become.

In 2013, Alibaba's platforms recorded 5.8 billion dollars in sales during the 24-hour event. That seemed impossibly large at the time. By 2017, the figure had ballooned to over 25 billion dollars—just on Alibaba's sites. When you added in rival platforms like JD.com, the total reached 44.5 billion dollars in a single day.

By 2021, Alibaba and JD.com together generated 139 billion dollars in Singles' Day sales.

And by 2025, the event crossed 150 billion dollars annually—more than Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day combined. Not close to those events. More than both of them added together.

To put this in perspective: the entire country of Portugal has a GDP of around 250 billion dollars per year. Singles' Day generates more than half of Portugal's annual economic output in twenty-four hours.

The Infrastructure of Consumption

Running an event of this scale requires extraordinary technical capabilities. During Singles' Day 2017, Alibaba's mobile payment app Alipay processed 256,000 payment transactions per second. Over the full 24 hours, the system handled 1.48 billion individual transactions without collapsing.

In 2020, the event resulted in four billion packages being shipped. That's roughly one package for every two people on Earth, generated in a single day of shopping.

The Irony at the Heart of Singles' Day

Here's where the story gets strange.

A holiday created to celebrate being single has become one of the most popular days in China to get married. In 2011—a particularly auspicious year because the date read 11/11/11, creating six ones instead of four—over 4,000 couples tied the knot in Beijing alone. The daily average for marriages in the city was around 700.

The holiday has developed its own symbolic language around this contradiction. The single digit 1 represents an individual standing alone. But 11 can represent two individuals finding each other—two singles becoming a pair. And 11.11? That's two couples, four people total, all finding love on the same special day.

So Singles' Day has become, paradoxically, both a celebration of solitude and a mass matchmaking event. Blind date parties are common. The Chinese media fills with discussions of love and relationships. Young people use the occasion to express their hopes of finding a partner—even as the algorithms simultaneously encourage them to buy something nice for themselves.

The Gala That Rivals the Super Bowl

Alibaba doesn't just run a sale. It produces an entire entertainment spectacle.

Each year, on the night before Singles' Day, the company hosts massive celebratory galas featuring international celebrities. Nicole Kidman appeared in 2017. Taylor Swift performed at the Shanghai gala in 2019. Katy Perry livestreamed a performance in 2020. These aren't small promotional appearances—they're full-scale productions designed to generate the kind of buzz that American brands achieve with Super Bowl halftime shows.

The message is clear: this isn't just shopping. It's a cultural event. A holiday that deserves its own traditions, its own spectacles, its own rituals of anticipation and participation.

Going Global—With Complications

Singles' Day has spread far beyond China's borders, particularly throughout Southeast Asia. The e-commerce platform Lazada, which operates across the region, recorded 6.5 million items ordered during the 2017 event. Indonesia has developed its own version called Harbolnas—an abbreviation of Hari Belanja Online Nasional, meaning "National Online Shopping Day"—though Indonesians typically celebrate it on December 12th rather than November 11th.

The expansion into Western markets has been more complicated.

MediaMarkt, a German electronics retailer, has promoted Singles' Day in Germany and Belgium. But in Belgium, the campaign generated backlash. November 11th is Armistice Day—the anniversary of the 1918 ceasefire that ended World War One. Throughout Belgium, and much of Europe, the date carries solemn associations with the war dead. A shopping festival felt deeply inappropriate to many Belgians.

This collision of meanings reveals something important about how holidays work. November 11th means different things to different cultures. In China, it's bare sticks and shopping carts. In Belgium, it's poppies and remembrance. In the United States, it's Veterans Day. The same date, carrying completely different emotional weight depending on where you stand.

The United Kingdom has tried to split the difference by creating National Singles Day on March 11th instead—avoiding any conflict with Armistice commemorations while still capitalizing on the marketing potential of celebrating singlehood.

The Trademark Wars

Success breeds conflict, and Singles' Day has generated plenty.

In December 2012, Alibaba trademarked the Chinese term "双十一" (Double 11) under registration numbers 10136470 and 10136420. This meant that competitors couldn't legally use the phrase in their advertising—even though the holiday predated Alibaba's involvement by sixteen years.

By October 2014, Alibaba was threatening legal action against media outlets that accepted advertising from rivals using the Double 11 terminology. The company that had transformed a campus joke into a global phenomenon now claimed ownership of the joke itself.

This raised uncomfortable questions about who owns cultural events. Singles' Day wasn't invented by Alibaba. It emerged organically from student culture and spread through social networks long before any corporation got involved. But trademark law doesn't necessarily recognize that distinction.

The Pandemic Pivot and Economic Uncertainty

The story of Singles' Day isn't all exponential growth.

In 2022, neither Alibaba nor JD.com disclosed their Singles' Day sales figures for the first time in the event's history as a shopping holiday. China was still grappling with strict zero-COVID-19 policies, the economy faced significant headwinds, and the companies seemed reluctant to publicize numbers that might disappoint investors.

Alibaba acknowledged only that results were "in line with" the previous year—corporate speak for flat or potentially declining. JD.com vaguely claimed a "record-breaking" event without providing specifics.

This opacity marked a significant shift. For years, the escalating sales figures had been a source of national pride and corporate boasting. The reluctance to share numbers suggested that even the world's largest shopping day wasn't immune to broader economic forces.

What Singles' Day Tells Us About Modern China

Beyond the shopping and the celebrities, Singles' Day offers a window into contemporary Chinese society.

The holiday connects to deeper anxieties about marriage and demographics. China has a well-documented gender imbalance, a legacy of the one-child policy that resulted in far more boys being born than girls. The term sheng nü—sometimes translated as "leftover women"—describes unmarried women over a certain age, reflecting societal pressure to marry young.

Singles' Day simultaneously mocks and validates these pressures. It gives single people a day to celebrate their status while also providing a socially acceptable occasion to seek partners. The blind date parties and relationship discussions acknowledge the cultural expectation of marriage even while the shopping sprees assert the independence and purchasing power of single consumers.

There's also something revealing about how thoroughly commerce has absorbed the holiday. What began as a celebration of a particular life stage—being young, single, free—has become indistinguishable from consumption itself. The transformation mirrors broader changes in Chinese society, where rapid economic development has made shopping a primary form of leisure and self-expression.

A Holiday for Our Time

Singles' Day feels like a distinctly twenty-first century creation.

It emerged from internet culture rather than religious tradition or historical commemoration. It was amplified by social media and e-commerce platforms. It crossed borders not through migration or conquest but through the spread of digital marketplaces. Its meaning shifted based on corporate interests and consumer behavior rather than centuries of accumulated ritual.

And yet something human persists at its core. Four young men in a dormitory, tired of being alone, decided to make a joke of their situation. They turned their shared condition into a celebration. That impulse—to find community in solitude, to make light of loneliness, to assert that being single is a valid way to exist—predates the internet by millennia.

The shopping will probably continue to grow. The galas will feature new celebrities. The trademark disputes will wind through courts. But somewhere, on November 11th, groups of single people will still gather to commiserate and celebrate, just as they did in that Nanjing dormitory more than thirty years ago.

The bare sticks stand together. And standing together, they're a little less bare.