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Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has turned the anti-Valentine’s Day in China into a huge global shopping event. How will Singles’ Day go in a COVID-19 world?
Singles Day started Wednesday in Asia and is expected to reap significant profits for online retailer Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
This is good news for the e-commerce giant, which lost $ 76 billion of its market value last week after the Chinese government suspended the long-awaited IPO of Alibaba’s financial arm, Ant Group.
But what’s the backstory of the festival known as “Double Eleven” and why do people celebrate it by buying tons of stuff? Here’s what you need to know.
First of all, what does “Double Eleven” have to do with single people?
The name of the festival is tied to the date – November 11 – but even November 11 looks like four single people in a row. And the pronunciation of all those eleven in Mandarin sounds like an idiom that means “all my life” or “all my life”. Indicates mushy music.
It’s a little kinder than the alternate name of the day, “Guang Gun Jie” (“Bare Sticks Day”) which is a game about numbers themselves and the idea that singles are lone sticks that don’t add to the family tree. Ouch.
Yikes. So why do single people get their day out?
Come on, they’ve bought enough wedding gifts for their married friends over the years, so why not ?! But in all seriousness, the story goes that Singles Day was started by four bachelors at the University of Nanjing in 1993 as a kind of protest against Valentine’s Day in traditionally obsessed with marriage culture.
Is it also for all single women?
Feminists have criticized the way traditional Chinese society views single women. “The Chinese girl was brought up, then as now, with marriage in sight as her goal,” Confucius wrote, and unmarried women are sometimes labeled “sheng nu” (“remaining women”) and watched from the high down if they weren’t wives and mothers. For this reason, some see Singles’ Day as deeply sexist, even as it has turned into an online shopping blitz, Racked said.
Complicated. So how is Singles’ Day celebrated?
Many ways. Sometimes it’s an excuse for single friends to get together and celebrate – or try matchmaking and get organized with dates.
It’s also a good day to do something downright anti-single, like a wedding. In fact, 4,000 couples applied to get married in Beijing on the last single day of November 11, 2011, five times more than the city’s average daily marriages, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Cold. My wedding invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. Go shopping!
Since Alibaba capitalized on the trend in 2009, Singles’ Day has also been dedicated to shopping til I drop.
Last year, the company hit $ 38.3 billion in gross merchandise volume, breaking previous Singles’ Day sales records. In fact, Singles’ Day sales hit 84 billion yuan ($ 12 billion) by the first hour in 2019. All those single people were definitely stocking up – and many of their married friends too.
And this year?
Alibaba hopes wealthy Chinese consumers will be eager to spend despite the pandemic, looking for online luxury goods they could have bought while traveling abroad before the COVID-19 travel restrictions came.
Alibaba is also introducing two million new products – double the amount last year – Reuters reported.
So will the pandemic increase or hurt sales?
Online retailers have generally fared well as shoppers have gotten stuck at home clicking on a semblance of normalcy, although COVID-19 has caused widespread unemployment around the world, which significantly slows down shopping.
But like Amazon, which moved its Prime Days to October and got a “Christmas creep” on holiday shoppers, Alibaba also held early discount days from November 1 to November 3, and all 11-day sales will be taken into account in the total volume of gross goods. He’s betting those 11 days will mix for a lucrative Singles’ Day.
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