How China's e-commerce blowout could dethrone Black Friday

In the United States, Nov. 11 is Veterans Day, commemorating America's veterans on the anniversary of the armistice that effectively ended World War I. In China, Nov. 11 is Singles Day, a day for those unattached Chinese with internet access and a credit card to indulge themselves by buying stuff online.

For anyone worried about China's rise as an economic superpower, this might not be welcome news, but Chinese singles will spend more on Monday than Americans will drop on America's equally contrived online shopping binge, Cyber Monday (the first workday after Thanksgiving). And China is even creeping up on that paragon of U.S. consumerism, Black Friday.

It's not there yet. On Singles Day 2012, Chinese bachelors and bachelorettes spent at least $3.1 billion in 24 hours; this year, they're expected to raise that to $5 billion. In comparison, Americans spent about $1.5 billion last Cyber Monday, and could shell out $2.3 billion this year. Black Friday is still king — last year, Americans spent $11.2 billion on the Friday after Thanksgiving, according to ShopperTrak.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But it's not hard to read the writing on the wall. Black Friday has been around since the 1960s, and even Cyber Monday is a relatively established event, dating back to 2005. Singles Day started at Chinese universities in the 1990s, but it didn't really turn into a retail bonanza until 2009, when online giant Alibaba (imagine Google, Amazon, and PayPal combined) appropriated it.

Alibaba owns two of China's big e-commerce sites, Taobao and Tmall, and China's dominant online-payment service, Alipay. In 2009, Tmall — the instigator of commercializing Singles Day — pulled in $8.2 million. This year, Alibaba ringed up $160 million worth of sales in the first six minutes of Singles Day, and it is expected to earn the lion's share of the day's total haul. According to Forrester Research, China will overtake the U.S. as top dog in online shopping this year.

In Chinese, Singles Day is literally called "bare sticks holiday," and its date, 11/11, represents four singles. It didn't start out as an excuse to shop. "Legend has it that four single, male college students in Nanjing, the city in central China, decided to celebrate, not bemoan, their status, in a culture that expects people to marry and produce an heir before 30 as an act of filial piety," says Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times. "Not to do so is tantamount to a sin, so celebrating one's single status is akin to thumbing one's nose at society."

How did Singles Day grow from a slightly subversive celebration of singlehood to a consumer orgy that could soon make America's e-shoppers look frugal? Basically, Alibaba and its subsidiaries gave China's exploding ranks of online shoppers an excuse to go crazy, and Black Friday–style sales to knock down any inhibitions they might have.

"Chinese people love to shop," Eric Wong of Shanghai e-commerce strategy firm Possible tells the The New York Times. "If you have the right excuse and the right occasion, they will spend money. One of the tactics to get people to buy is to create a more festive occasion."

Singles Day may have started out as a rejection of the culture of early marriage and domestic consumerism, but now, "like Columbus Day sales in the United States, Singles Day retains little connection with the people or events that inspired it," say Shanshan Wang and Eric Pfanner in The New York Times. "As a red letter day for shoppers, it has spread beyond lonely-hearts to Chinese consumers of all kinds — single or married, male or female, young or old, urban or rural."

And when it comes to number of consumers, the U.S. doesn't hold a candle to China. Right now China and America have roughly the same number of online shoppers, about 270 million, says Linda Yueh at BBC News. "But, the internet penetration in China is only around 45 percent and, of course, they have about another billion people who can get into the spending habit." In that sense, it's no real shock that China could outspend America in one big group splurge.

Maybe not in the U.S., though. Cyber Monday still has room to grow, and Black Friday is slowly creeping into Thanksgiving Day and out to Sunday. And as individualistic as Americans are, we don't tend to celebrate being single: In fact, it should be noted at this point that U.S. couples spent about $18.6 billion on Valentine's Day this year, according to National Retail Federation estimates.

Watch CNBC's report on this year's Singles Day: