Remember when Black Friday was all the rage?
Coined on the East coast in 1966, it occurs between the 23rd and 29th of November following Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving is traditionally spent with family, getting in arguments about whether the living room television would screen the Detroit Lions or the Macy’s Day Parade and conducting stealth missions into the kitchen to get a taste of the turkey and stuffing despite being ordered not to…Why aren’t we doing a better job being thankful on Thanksgiving? Because the satanic lure of Black Friday is creeping around the corner and turning blessed American spirits into greedy consumers.
Well, now that hellish hoopla has been pushed up in the calendar by two days, with the introduction of online shopping and Cyber Monday. The term made its debut when in 2005 Shop.org presented a press release called, “Cyber Monday’ Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year.”
According to the Shop.org 2005 eHoliday Mood Study:
“77% of online retailers said that their sales increased substantially last year on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a trend that is driving serious online discounts and promotions on Cyber Monday this year (2005)”.
In the same year the New York Times reported that:
“The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked.”
Then, in 2006, Shop.org announced that it launched the CyberMonday.com portal, a one-stop shop for Cyber Monday deals. And in 2009, comScore reported that consumers spent $887M online on Cyber Monday, the second highest spending day of 2009.
The term Cyber Monday is also used in the marketing world of Portugal, Turkey, Venezuela, France and the United Kingdom. In these countries, Cyber Monday sales last for eight days, usually from the last Monday in November to the first Monday in December.
There are several theories as to why online sales increase so explosively on Cyber Monday; however, some debate if all retailers experience this trend. One theory suggests that people see certain items in the shopping malls over the weekend and wait until Monday to buy them online, where they may compare prices, avoid lines and take advantage of free shipping or other offers. Yet another theory suggests that shoppers have faster internet connections at work and, henceforth, wait until then to make their online purchases.
This year, Cyber Monday starts on November 29th, exactly 26 days before Christmas.
Simply put, the way to get the most out of the many Cyber Monday deals and specials out there is preparation. Remember that your goal is maximizing savings in your purchases for Christmas needs and to save on effort in buying them.
First it is quite important to know where you are at financially. Check all your bank and credit card balances and determine how much money you may budget for your purchases. You don’t want to go bankrupt after the sale. You can also include how much cash on hand you happen to have that you can use to deposit to pay your credit card purchases.
Start going to department stores and look at the items in your list. Check for designs, brands, colors and sizes so that you would know exactly what you want.
With your budget and your list ready, begin searching online for the stores early Sunday as there are stores who advertise early. Since you already more or less pin pointed what you need, it will be easy for you to search for the stores who offer them.
So now it’s not rush to Macy’s to find the hot sale before it gets snatched from the shelf, with a weapon for self-defense; but rush to the family PC to fill up the electronic shopping cart.
Since the American holiday of Thanksgiving is a secular one, Israel really doesn’t have anything to compare with it, as all holidays in Israel, save that of Independence Day, are religious ones. There are no shortage of “turkeys” in the Jewish State, however. By that simile, I’m not referring to the stately bird that graced the table of millions of American homes on Thursday, allowing them to more than stuff themselves with an abundance of food and drink while watching an assortment of parades, sporting events, and other holiday activities. Nothing happening in this country can even compare to this American national event which has been in effect since U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in 1863 that the “forth Thursday in the month of November will be a day of thanksgiving for all the blessings that Almighty God has bestowed upon us”. 
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