Q: What date is today?
A: July 15th.
Q: Oh, do you know what day is today?
A: Monday.
Q: Yes and no.
A: Why no? (NB: A’s role is swapped. A asks instead.)
Q: That’s not what I mean. Today is Amazon Prime Day. (NB: And Q answers.)
Thank you for your indulgence for my little soliloquy. (You can find more about my internal dialogues in my memoir “Golden Orchid“.)
I happen to learn about Amazon Prime Day over the past week. I’ve heard about it but I never get to a degree to pay close attention to it. This year’s Amazon Prime Day seems to be more noticeable than before. Maybe its ads are omnipresent–from the special print on the Amazon package envelopes to its home website, to the news coverage on the prime time TV news.
For me, it’s hard not to make a comparison between Amazon Prime Day and Alibaba’s Singles’ Day (Guanggun Jie in Mandarin) which falls on November 11. My experience with the latter precedes the former.
I wonder who is the copycat? It becomes clear that Amazon is looking to Alibaba for inspiration.
Pardon my ignorance. I just learned online that Amazon Prime Day began on July 15, 2015 to celebrate Amazon.com’s 20th anniversary. Since then, the annual shopping holiday features a large number of sales and promotions that are exclusive to Prime members. Many online shoppers call it “Amazon’s Black Friday” although the Prime Day does not necessarily fall on a Friday.
While in China, Singles’ Day has nothing to do with Alibaba’s online festivity when it first started in 1993. Some university students in Nanjing picked the day–November 11–in honor of being singles, because 11/11 consists of four “ones”, representing four singles. The idea was soon in the domino effect, spreading to many other university campuses, and then the public media, social media and domestic merchants. In the end, Jack Ma picked up the idea in 2009 and turned it into an online shopping extravaganza in his flagship website Taobao.com.
Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales have reached world records year after year, making billions of US dollars in a single day. According to a Forbes article, last year’s Singles Day was the world’s largest shopping festival with US$30.8 billion in gross merchandise volume. How can that amount of green notes not arouse the green-eyed jealousy of the tech giants elsewhere?
If you don’t like money, you cannot be a businessman. If you can’t make money, your busineess can’t survive. What makes an entrepreneur stands out is his vision, ambition, and a little greed helps. In this respect, Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos are in the same club.(You may also count the incumbent 45th US President.)
Under the wings of motherland China, Jack Ma’s Alibaba is invincible at home. As more and more Chinese people rely on e-commerce, there will be more new records on Singles’ Day in the near future, unless the law of supply and demand is disrupted.
This year marks the 4th anniversary of Amazon Prime Day since it started, but it’s also the longest period for 48 hours. So if you miss today’s sales, you’ll still have your chance tomorrow.
Q: What date is today?
A: July 16th.
Q: Oh, do you know what day is today?
A: Tuesday.
Q: Yes and no.
A: Why no? (NB:A’s role is swapped. A asks instead.)
Q: That’s not what I mean. Today is Amazon Prime Day. (NB: And Q answers.)
Voice Over: Does it sound like a Groundhog Day?
Wanna say something to me? Click here and thanks!