Today is Singles Day - and it doesn't have much to do with your marital status

You may have heard that today's Singles Day is celebrated, or perhaps you have received a flood of emails from “must-see” promotions designed to celebrate singleness around the world. But then, what does one thing have to do with another - and how did this weird holiday come on the annual calendar?

As far as anyone knows, Singles Day originated in China in 1993, and the date “11/11” was chosen simply because the number “1” represents one person alone. More precisely, it seems that the celebration was invented by students of Nanjing University, one of the most prestigious in the country, and the festivity actually had a rather timid start when only men attended.

Valentine's Day in reverse

Basically, Singles Day (or Guanggun Jie in the original language) was kind of a joke so that single students - as well as those committed to their "Valentine's Day" - had something to celebrate as well. Only instead of buying something for someone else, as lovers do, the focus was on giving themselves.

It is worth noting that this Singles Day talk has to do with the gender imbalance that exists in China, where, due to the “only one child per couple” policy, there are more men than women in the country.

The fact is that, over time, Singles Day was gaining in popularity and spreading to other Chinese universities. Then, on a fine day in 2009, smart international trade giant Alibaba decided to take the opportunity and offer promotions during the holiday season to leverage sales.

Change of focus

Alibaba's strategy worked - incredibly - well: in the first year of promotions, the company earned $ 7 million (about $ 23.5 million) just during the festivities, and in 2011, when it was celebrated 11/11 11, the “Singles Day of the Century”, sales totaled over US $ 625 million (R $ 2.1 billion). By 2013, the celebration's madness had already exceeded $ 9 billion in sales in a single day.

The result was that, in a few years, Singles Day eventually turned into an extraordinary commercial phenomenon. So much so that in 2015 alone, sales at the celebration totaled a scare of $ 14.3 billion, surpassing sales of Cyber ​​Monday and Black Friday - combined three times!

This year's promotions are already running wild - and our fellow TecMundo peers are making real-time coverage of the best deals if you're interested in getting your holiday shopping ahead of time - and projections are that sales are up $ 20 billion by the end of Singles Day.

And it is very likely that the forecasts will be confirmed, because, in the first 12 hours of sales, Alibaba's people had already invoiced more than US $ 12 billion (just over R $ 40 billion)! In short: Although it started as a mere joke, Singles Day has turned into yet another commemorative date whose sole focus is to make people spend money.