Cyber Monday and the history of online holiday shopping
Lesson summary
Ready to go? This is Plain English lesson number 319. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and the full lesson can be found at PlainEnglish.com/319.
Coming up today: where did the term Cyber Monday come from, and what does it mean? It’s a worldwide phenomenon—not one of America’s best cultural exports, in my opinion, but nonetheless a worldwide phenomenon. I’ll talk about where the term comes from today. I decided to take a holiday from researching serious topics, so this is the second lesson I wrote over the American Thanksgiving weekend.
The phrasal verb today is “back up” in the sense of supporting a claim. And we have a song of the week—and a bonus book recommendation, too. I don’t do that a lot, but listen up and you’ll hear it.
The origins of ‘Cyber Monday’
The first thing you need to know about “Cyber Monday” is the word “cyberspace.” This was the original, invented word to describe the online world, back when the Internet was first being adopted. I was born in 1981, so I’m one of the youngest people to ever have lived in the pre-online world. I think my family got access to online services when I was about 14 years old.
Anyway, “cyberspace” described this separate world, the world inside your computer when you were connected to the Internet. It was undoubtedly a different place than the real world. Today, the online world and the real world are one and the same. If you were born after, say, 1987, then you have no idea how separate and different the online world, or “cyberspace,” once seemed.
So anyway, in the earliest days of online shopping, which was about 15 years ago, most people either didn’t have internet connections at home or their internet connections at home weren’t stable. Paying for something online was considered risky. You were always worried that you might be charged twice, that someone would steal your card number, or that your transaction wouldn’t go through. If you bought something online, you wanted to have the fastest and most stable internet connection possible to avoid complications.
Where did many people have the fastest and most stable internet connections? They had them at work. According to the legend, people would see online shopping deals advertised during Thanksgiving weekend, but they wouldn’t buy them at home because they didn’t trust their internet connections at home. They waited! They waited until Monday, when they got back into their offices, with their fast and secure internet connections, and they did their shopping on Monday.
I have always thought this story was—let’s just say, “incomplete.” The term “Cyber Monday” was invented by a trade organization of retailers: that should tell you something right there. They issued a press release declaring that the Monday after Thanksgiving was popular with online shoppers. This press release was picked up by news organizations. Its true purpose was to make people feel more comfortable with the idea of online shopping.
I will concede that there is some data to back this up: a large portion of online sales in the early 2010’s were done from work computers and this Monday was popular for online shopping from work computers. No argument there. And in the very earliest days of the internet, the most stable connection was often at an office. I can confirm people were hesitant to shop from home computers, where internet connections weren’t as fast.
The legend of Cyber Monday, however, quickly departed from the reality. After just a few years, people got more stable internet connections at home and they could easily shop over Thanksgiving weekend and Black Friday: they didn’t need to wait until Monday. And of course, we office workers are human: yes, online shopping from work continued, but not because of any magic about the Monday. We shop online at work all the time! Cyber Monday, then, turned into just another way for retailers to capture our attention and proved to fill up some quality airtime on otherwise slow news broadcasts.
These days, Cyber Monday is a catch-all term for online-only sales on the web sites of traditional or online-only retailers. If you run an online business, like I do, you know that many online software companies run “Cyber Monday” sales. As the online and traditional retail worlds continue to merge, the distinction between “Cyber Monday” and “Black Friday” has blurred. They are now just two vague terms that anchor the overall end-of-year shopping season that now starts in late October and extends until the new year.
Here’s a memory. In the early days of online shopping, it took a long time for your payment to be processed. You would click “buy” and then you’d see a swirling circle for a full minute, which is an eternity, sometimes two or three minutes. There would be a warning on the screen: do not click your browser’s back button. As you watched the circle swirling around, you got this feeling of dread: my payment might not go through, and there’s no way for me to know. Sometimes, you would just get a blank page instead of a confirmation, so there was no way to know if your payment was successful.
And that was back before you could check your credit card statement instantly. If you were charged twice, it was hard to get a refund. You might have to wait a few weeks to get your money back. The fear—and I laugh at it now—the fear of shopping online was real. Today, we buy cars online.
Did you know what ‘Cyber Monday’ meant?
All right, so a question for you: Did you know what Cyber Monday meant? Be honest! Tell me in our free Facebook group at PlainEnglish.com/Facebook.
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