Holiday Shopping Drives Culture
What is Cyber Week/Black Friday weekend anymore? It’s a shopping extravaganza, yes. But it’s also a cultural phenomenon that overlaps with sports, entertainment, and technology. On Black Friday:
🏈 Amazon aired its second annual NFL game, in which the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Las Vegas Raiders 19–17 under the watchful gaze of Taylor Swift, attending in person.
🎯Target stores banked on Taylor Swift’s massive popularity by selling a special edition Taylor Swift book and vinyl record available exclusively at Target.
🛍️ Amazon Live and TalkShopLive hosted a livestreamed shopping event with Martha Stewart, Eve Mendes, Jennifer Hudson, and Kimberly Schlapman, where they all hawked branded merchandise.
On Cyber Monday, Dolly Parton hosted a livestream with Walmart and TalkShopLive, which featured 30+ Dolly branded products.
How did this entertainment and commerce extravaganza turn out? The NFL game drew 13.5 million viewers, marking a 41% increase from the previous year’s broadcast. Meanwhile, Target stores enjoyed a surge in foot traffic of nearly 17% compared with last year, according to Placer.ai. (All hail TayTay!) Amazon gushed that its Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday holiday shopping period was its biggest ever although the company did not release any figures.
Amazon also noted that Rufus, Amazon’s AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, helped customers to find tailored deals and gifts, which demonstrates how Black Friday and Cyber Week are converging with another cultural phenomenon, our adoption of generative AI. Recently a popular meme expressed hope that AI could do our dishes and laundry for us instead of changing the world. Maybe shopping during the official start of the holiday retail season is AI’s do-the-dishes-and-laundry culturally defining moment.
No word yet on how the Dolly Parton or Martha Stewart & Co. live streams went over. But I’ll bet the Dolly Parton event went over well because of her successful relationship with Walmart.
Black Friday and Cyber Week are really a state of mind now. Amazon and the Covid-19 pandemic changed how we shop during the holidays. People returned to stores amid the pandemic, but we’d also become more comfortable spreading out our “Black Friday” shopping over a period of days. This is why you can now wander into a Macy’s, Walmart, or any other big retailer before Thanksgiving and find Black Friday deals.
I still shop on the actual Black Friday specifically to experience Record Store Black Friday, when independent record store merchants feature limited-edition vinyl records. I still get a thrill out of getting my hot little hands on a precious vinyl like The Doors Live in Detroit for my own enjoyment.
Did you indulge in Black Friday Week and Cyber Week? What was your experience?
