Everything on Sale for Celebrating Singles Day

Singles' Day or Guanggun Jie is a holiday popular among young Chinese people that celebrate their pride in being single. The date, November 11th (11/11), was chosen because the number "1" resembles an individual who is alone.

The holiday has become the largest offline and online shopping day in the world, with Alibaba shoppers exceeding 168.2 billion yuan (US$25.4 billion) in spending during the 2017 celebration.

In the first 3 minutes on Singles Day of 2018, the turnover break through 20 billion RMB, around 3 billion dollars. What a miracle! 

There are several theories explaining the creation of the Singles' Day festival. The most widely accepted theory is that the holiday grew out of Nanjing University's dorm culture. One origin story is that in 1993, four male students of Nanjing University's Mingcaowuzhu dorm discussed how they could break away from the monotony of being single and agreed that November 11 would be a day of events and celebrations in honor of being single. These activities spread through the university and eventually made their way into wider society. The spread increased with social media use, and the event has become increasingly popular within contemporary Chinese culture and society(from Wikipedia).

As more people join in the celebration of this holiday many companies have taken the opportunity to target younger consumers. On Singles' Day 2017, Alibaba set a world record for most payment transactions during the festival. Its mobile wallet app Alipay processed 256,000 payment transactions per second. A total of 1.48 billion transactions were processed by Alipay in the entire 24 hours, with delivery orders reaching close to 700 million, breaking the previous record set in 2016. The event is now nearly four times the size of America's biggest shopping days, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

On this day, I bought almost 20 things online, including boots, coat, electric toothbrush, headphone, mascara, eyebrow pencil, health product, slippers, sweater, facial mask and so on. Sounds creepy, right? Haha. But when I came to office this morning, my colleague told me she even bought a wig! My another colleague messaged me and asked me if I can buy a headphone with him online so that we got a cheaper price. God, why doesn’t he tell me earlier!

Various events occur in different parts of the world on November 11. These events include Veterans Day in the United States, Remembrance Day in Australia and Remembrance Day in Canada. Many Americans, Canadians, and Australians have a moment of silence at 11 am (11:00) local time on November 11 each year to honor soldiers who fought for their country. Other countries that observe Remembrance Day include the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Dates such as 11/11/11 are also popular for weddings, product or service launches, and other planned events as the date is easy to remember.