On ‘single’s day,’ Chinese declare their love for deals
Consumers shatter online shopping records
BEIJING — China’s “Double 11” day makes America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday look tame in comparison. In the first 68 seconds of Nov. 11, Chinese consumers had spent $1 billion snapping up bargains online. Within the first hour, they’d spent $14.3 billion — about half the total recorded last year during the Thanksgiving shopping season in the United States.
Even though the Chinese economy is flagging — or perhaps because it’s flagging — consumers are even more eager for bargains on China’s most frenzied shopping day of the year.
“There were so many discounts available that it makes me feel that I have to buy something or I would be missing out big time,” said Zhang Hui, 31, an employee at a public relations firm here who snapped up a pair of boots and an overcoat on Taobao for a total of $142.
Nov. 11 has long been celebrated in Asia as “singles’ day” — because the 11/11 date looks like four singles — and has been commandeered in Japan by Pocky and in South Korea by Peppero, respectively, the makers of chocolate sticks that look like the numeral one. It is marketed as a kind of anti-Valentine’s Day, when singles can spend on themselves.
The day began to be marked in China in the 1990s, when university students celebrated being single on the day, known here as “Double 11.”
But in 2009, e-commerce giant Alibaba started marketing it as the best day of the year to go crazy on its shopping websites, Taobao and Tmall. Many people now stock up on household goods in particular, buying a year’s worth of shampoo or toilet paper on Nov. 11, when online retailers offer discounts and coupons.
“Our goal is to stimulate consumption demand and support lifestyle upgrades in China through new brands and products,” Fan Jiang, president of Taobao and Tmall, said in the lead-up to the shopping day.
The Chinese economy has been cooling markedly in recent years, with growth slowing to a 30-year low of 6.2 percent, according to the most recent official statistics.
To whip up excitement for this year’s shopping frenzy, Alibaba had Taylor Swift headline its 11.11 Countdown Gala, which was broadcast live on television. Swift performed three songs in a Technicolor extravaganza in a Shanghai
stadium.
The numbers racked up on China’s biggest shopping day of the year are mind-boggling.
Alibaba said it hoped Taobao, its main shopping portal where online store owners offer their wares, would attract more than 500 million users, or 100 million more than last year. Alibaba’s cloud computing system, Aliyun, was processing 540,000 transactions per second at one point on Monday morning.
Before 8 a.m., Alibaba’s logistics arm had dispatched more than 100 million packages of preordered goods. The State Post Bureau said it expected to handle 2.8 billion packages this week, up a quarter from last year. That’s two packages for every single person in China.
By 5 p.m., Alibaba’s measure of sales — gross merchandise volume — had surpassed 2018’s day total of $30.8 billion. By comparison, American retailers sold only $7.9 billion worth of goods on Cyber Monday last year.
But environmentalists are alarmed by the amount of packaging produced on this one day, with Greenpeace estimating the day could generate more than 250,000 tons of waste. Alibaba has said that it is aware of environmental concerns and would be “greener than ever” this Nov. 11.
“Given its scale, minimizing environmental impact is essential and our technology will ensure it is a green 11.11 Global Shopping Festival,” Fan said in a statement at the end of last month.
The pressure is also mounting on the people who have to schlep all these parcels to front doors. Delivery companies have hired an additional 400,000 workers to get goods to customers and increased incentives for the already-beleaguered fleets of motorbike couriers.