Will You Participate?

I haven't even heard of Cyber Monday until just recently, but I guess it's a big deal.

The Monday after Black Friday is "expected e-commerce sites to reach $1.2 billion in sales, which would be a 17 percent increase over last year", according to The New York Times. However, according to the article, this increase is probably due to the hard times. The recession seems to have triggered not only a wave of shopping for deals, but we can also see examples after this years Black Friday occurrences. On the other side, others see Cyber Monday as "more hype than reality", because according to Blue Nile, the online jeweler, “The majority of consumers are procrastinators and they’ll wait as long as they can."

All in all, Cyber Monday is a big event and just like Black Friday will have it's own set of chaos. With "early sales reports indicated that it could again be the best day of the season for e-commerce companies" and people benefiting from good deals one could say "It's almost ceremonial".

So my question is what makes Cyber Monday so exciting? Is it the deals that are of great importance? Or the hype?

(Image: An Amazon warehouse in Swansea, Wales, last week. The Monday after Thanksgiving was Amazon.com’s busiest day last year.)

Wal-Mart Domininance Challenged?

Amazon attempts to challenge the all mighty retail chain Wal-Mart this holiday season. This all started when Amazon went head to head with matching the low prices of Wal-Mart of new books and DVDs. This price war set a precedent for the dropping of prices of all types of things, ranging from Easy Bake Ovens, to Xboxes, to cell phones.

However, the war between them is more than about price alone. The future and new technology play a huge role in this battle. Though online retailing is onyl 4% of retail sales, it is rapid spreading, it did not suffer as much from the economy, and access to online shopping is faster and easier to access. There is still the factor of instant gratification that offline shopping provides. However, Amazon now has same day shipping.

Do you think Wal-Mart should be seriously concened? How wise is it that prices are already so low before Black Friday? How will it hurt the economy, or do you think it's a good thing? How has online shopping revolusionized the retailing industry? Do you think the easiness to compare for the best prices is going to help or hurt our economy at all? To read more, the link is embedded in the title.

-Sandy Chen