Business Week on Cyber Monday

If you do a Google search for the term “Cyber Monday”, you’ll come across 947,000 sites currently using the term, which was apparently coined just a little over a week and a half ago to describe a supposed jump in online shopping that would occur on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Although many websites have started talking about this new “shopping holiday”, Business Week Online has an article up that suggests the term is nothing more than marketting hype created by a November 21st Shop.org press release.

It’s interesting to see how quickly a well-timed and well-created marketing plan can quickly turn into a growing internet meme that outdoes any original expectations.

Firefox 1.5

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the release of version 1.5 of the popular web browser Firefox.

Some of the improvements seen in this release of the alternative to Internet Explorer are an improved rendering engine, better automated updates, browser tabs that allow drag and drop reordering, improved popup blocking and increased support for platforms such as Apple’s OSX operating system.

Image of the Day: Black Friday

Black Friday Rush

I’ve survived Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which tends to be one of the busier shopping days in the United States during the Christmas holiday season.

My shift started at 3am in preparation for the store’s early opening at 6am. Even at that early hour, however, I was greeted with a line stretching down through our shopping center past ten other stores. One of the big draws for shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving are the number of “door buster” items advertised at extremely low prices, such as an eMachine desktop PC for $149.

The still-growing crowd was eventually let into the store and what followed was a twelve hour shift that flew by in a blur of customer activity. By the time I left the store at 3:30pm, the only thought I had was of a long, hot bath followed by a good fourteen hours of sleep before my next shift began on 7am the next day.

Dangerous Cleveland

According to Morgan Quitno Publishing, Cleveland, Ohio is the 12th most dangerous city in America, out of 369 cities with a population of 75,000 or more. The often mentioned city of Washington, DC actually comes in 13th on the list.

The listing comes, apparently, from 2004 FBI records based on six general categories of crimes: “murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft.”

The XBox 360 eBay Explosion

XBox 360 Auctions on eBay

Today, of course, marked the release of Microsoft’s new XBox 360 videogame console. It also marked another explosive new item for online sales through eBay as thousands of people who stood in line for the $299 and $399 systems are now auctioning the units off for two to three times that amount.

At the store I was at this morning, a non-insignificant number of people were there solely due to the profit-making available anytime there’s a hot new product that combines large amounts of hype with very low amounts of retail availability.

Of course, the phenomenon also has a tendency to feed upon itself, as a good number of gamers who bought the system for themselves see the amounts of money being made through online auctions and decide to forgo their immediate pleasure for some quick cash made by selling their system.

No doubt we’ll continue to see this trend stretch through the holiday season as shoppers continue their push for every last gift option they can find.