The slow decline of Cyber Monday
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Cyber Monday is only 19 years old — it was created in 2005 by the National Retail Federation — but already it feels almost incomprehensibly anachronistic.
The big picture: Cyber Monday was an attempt by e-commerce companies to piggyback on the Black Friday shopping frenzy, which at the time was overwhelmingly an in-person affair.
Between the lines: The idea was that after taking Thursday and Friday off work, plus the weekend, office drones would log into their work computers on Monday, where they could order goods over the newfangled Internet.
Where it stands: Today, everybody has the internet in their pocket and e-commerce is mostly conducted over phones rather than desktop computers.
- As a result, since 2019 there has been more online shopping on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday.
The bottom line: Cyber Monday has become a way for retailers to squeeze an extra day of sales out of the Thanksgiving Day long weekend. But each year its popularity continues to decline.
