The Singles’ Day is a Chinese unofficial holiday and shopping season that celebrates people who are not in relationships.
Let’s find out more about the Singles’ Day!
- Today is the Singles’ Day or Double 11.
- It was originally called Bachelors’ Day.
- It is a Chinese unofficial holiday and shopping season that celebrates people who are not in relationships.
- The date, 11 November (11/11), was chosen because the numeral 1 resembles a bare stick.
- This is the Chinese Internet slang for an unmarried man who does not add ‘branches’ to the family tree.
- The four ‘1’s also abstractly refer to the demographic group of single people.
- Paradoxically, the holiday has become a popular date on which to celebrate relationships: more than 4,000 couples got married in Beijing on this date in 2011, far greater than the daily average of 700 marriages.
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- riginally, the date was celebrated as a cynical response to traditional couple-centric festivals by a small group of college bachelors.
- However, in 2009 Alibaba’s CEO Daniel Zhang began to use the day as a 24-hour shopping holiday festival that offered online shopping discounts and offline entertainment.
- The holiday has now become the largest physical retail and online shopping day in the world.
- Rivals to Alibaba, such as JD.com hosts Singles’ Day festival as well, which garnered US$19.1 billion, bringing the Chinese total to US$44.5 billion total sales volume in 2017.
- Alibaba shoppers exceeded 213.5 billion yuan (USD $30.7 billion) in total spend during 2018 Singles Day.
- In 2019, Alibaba said that its gross merchandise volume for the whole event came in at 268.4 billion yuan (US$38.4 billion), an increase of 26% from the previous year.
- In 2021, Alibaba and JD reached a new total Singles Day sales record of US$139 billion.
- The Singles’ Day, or Bachelors’ Day, originated at Nanjing University in 1993.
- Singles’ Day celebrations spread to several other universities in Nanjing during the 1990s.
- 11 November (11/11), consisting of four 1’s, was chosen as it represents four singles.
- There are several ideas explaining the creation of the Singles’ Day festival.
- The most widely accepted idea 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 (all single men) dorm discussed how they could break away from the monotony of being single and agreed that 11 November 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.
- The event is not an officially recognized public holiday in China.
- Despite that it has become the largest offline and online shopping day in the world.
- Sales in Alibaba’s sites, Tmall and Taobao, have reached US$5.8 billion in 2013, US$9.3 billion in 2014, US$14.3 billion in 2015, US$17.8 billion in 2016, and over US$25.4 billion in 2017.
- JD.com also achieved a sales record of US$19.1 billion in 2017, while Lazada drums up US$123 million.
- On Singles’ Day 2017, Alibaba set a world record for most payment transactions during the festival.
- A total of 1.48 billion transactions were processed by Alipay in the entire 24 hours, with delivery orders through Cainiao (Alibaba’s logistics affiliate) 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.
