On Tuesday, people visiting Web sites run by Alibaba, the Chinese Internet company, spent nearly three times the amount of money spent by all online shoppers in the United States last year on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
Alibaba, it turns out, has discovered a holiday of its own to exploit for commercial purposes. It’s called Singles’ Day, and, according to its own lore, it began in 1993, when a bunch of uncoupled students at Nanjing University, in China, decided to throw themselves a party to celebrate their bachelorhood. They called it Bachelors’ Day at first, and chose the date on the calendar most imbued with singleness—November 11th, or 11/11. Over time, Singles’ Day became more popular and spread beyond Nanjing. By the aughts, people around China were throwing Singles’ Day parties—one part pity party, one part mixer, one part celebration of independence. They also began buying gifts for their single friends (and, as it happened, their single selves).
This being China in the twenty-first century, the commercial potential of Singles’ Day could not be ignored for long. In 2009, Alibaba introduced a Singles’ Day sale on Tmall, one of its e-commerce sites. The timing was propitious. The following year, disenchanted young men coined the slang term diaosi—meaning, literally, “penis hair” and, figuratively, “loser.” Young, single, lower-income men and women eventually appropriated the word as a term of self-empowerment. As the Wall Street Journal ’s Wei Gu wrote, Internet companies soon began courting the diaosi as potential customers, having noticed that they spent much of their income online—playing games, watching videos, or shopping—and constituted a huge demographic in China. “What they lack in spending power compared with Western teens or rich Chinese, diaosi make up for in sheer numbers,” Gu wrote. Singles’ Day got another boost when Alibaba promoted the 2011 event (11/11/11!) as the most epic Singles’ Day this side of the Qing Dynasty. By November 11, 2013, Singles’ Day had become the biggest online-shopping day of the year, with Alibaba processing more than five billion dollars in sales. This year, the total passed nine billion dollars.
Alibaba is often described by Americans as the Amazon of China, but it is worth nearly twice as much. Much to the chagrin of the company’s executives, though probably not to their surprise, other Chinese online retailers have followed with November 11th sales of their own—the Times described one promotion, on a Groupon-style site, of a “bride-hunting trip to Vietnam.” To try to keep more of the gains for itself, Alibaba, in 2013, registered at least six trademarks associated with the phrase “Double Eleven,” a nickname for the holiday, according to Reuters. This past October, leading up to this year’s Singles’ Day, Reuters reported that JD.com, a rival to Alibaba, published a letter from Alibaba’s Tmall that warned publishers against running ads by other companies that use Alibaba’s trademark. “We express our extreme indignation and condemn some e-commerce companies for their demeaning activities,” the letter read. (The fact that Alibaba trademarked a nickname for a holiday in the first place has presumably provided executives at rival companies with some indignation of their own.)
Zia Daniell Wigder, an e-commerce analyst at the research firm Forrester, told me that, as more global brands start selling to Chinese customers through Tmall, awareness of Singles’ Day—and participation in the sales event—is sure to rise. Wigder is somewhat more skeptical about another aspect of Alibaba’s plan: this year, it is making an effort to expand Singles’ Day beyond China. The company’s Alizila newsletter reported earlier this month that the “11.11 Shopping Festival” would this year become a “cross-border affair” involving more than two hundred countries. One might think that the United States would be a natural fit for Singles’ Day—the share of Americans who have never married has fallen to a record low—but Wigder said that the U.S. market is already so mature that Singles’ Day isn’t likely to become a huge event for shoppers here. Alibaba might have more luck in places like Russia, she said, that are less mature, and where many online shoppers already use Chinese sites like Alibaba’s AliExpress. Wherever it may land, Singles’ Day seems less about its original purpose than about commerce—a very American notion, indeed.
