The online-retail industry group Shop.org wants us to refer to today as "Cyber Monday" — the online-shopping equivalent of "Black Friday." Here's the industry press release about this effort.
The idea, I guess, is to create an online shopping frenzy on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Why not just shop online on "Black Friday" and avoid the crowds? Two reasons: 1) Shop.org is a subsidiary of the National Retail Federation, an industry group that also represents the brick-and-mortar stores, so they don't want to pit online shoppers against their other constituents; and 2) most people go back to work on Monday — and they figure we do most of our online shopping while on the clock.
The National Retail Federation seems to be suggesting that decreased productivity can be good for the nation's economy. I for one, don't approve of this. Workers shouldn't be shopping online during office hours — it takes away from time they ought to be spending reading blogs.
It's brazenly cynical for an industry group to think they can just introduce a new catch-phrase and expect this phrase to alter Americans' shopping patterns. For such a scheme to work, you'd have to have a naive and easily manipulated press that lazily parrots industry press releases without the slightest qualm. You'd have to have a press and a public incapable of asking that most basic of questions: "Says who?"
So, in other words, it's working like a charm.
Hundreds of articles online, and many more on TV and radio, laud today as "Cyber Monday." Most of them, like this CNN/Money article, swallow the phrase whole without ever mentioning where it came from:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — It's take two in the holiday bargain frenzy, as holiday shoppers fresh from Black Friday surf the Internet from home and especially work for even more holiday deals on Cyber Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.
"Baaaa," the article continues. "Baa, baa, baaaaaaaa."
Even worse are the many articles — like this one from Time — attributing the phrase only to "analysts":
Many Web merchants wait until the Monday after Thanksgiving — dubbed "Black Monday" or "Cyber Monday" by retail analysts — to introduce their holiday sales specials.
You know, "retail analysts." The ones employed by the NRF.
Thus a PR effort by the online retail industry is rechristened as a work of science — the product of disinterested academics and not a deliberate industry ploy to spur more shopping.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. The PR flacks of corporate America are successfully imitating this trick. And our lazy press is helping them.
Updated: Changed the name of the post thanks to Steve's excellent suggestion.
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