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Singles Day


Living as we do in a world of shopping, where even your email tries to sell you yoghurt, where adblock is as essential to the online experience as a healthy sense of scepticism, and facing as we are the looming commercial behemoth that is the festive season, when would you imagine the world’s busiest online shopping day to be? Sometime soon, certainly, as people start to think about beating the annual December postal snarl-up. Something similar to the fabled Black Friday, when the US loses its collective mind in tsunami of credit card abuse.

So it comes as a mild surprise (not to mention a gentle reproof for being surprised, big wide world out there, don’t forget) to discover that it was yesterday. Nov 11th. Busiest online shopping day of the year. And the reason is the Chinese observation of Single’s Day. Essentially Valentine’s day for single people, single people buy themselves gifts, eat fried dough sticks (to signify the numerals of 11.11) and generally have a high old time of it, which is just as well, given that on current projections China is estimated to have 24 million more men than women by 2020, they might as well enjoy themselves (this gender ratio explains the day’s original name: Bachelor’s Day).
When a team on The Apprentice attempted to market the idea here they were basically laughed out of the room by Tesco*, who pointed out that no-one would buy the cards, I think there’s a point in there, somewhere.

*not just on general principles either, thought that would have been fine

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