Singles Day — the frenzied annual celebration of consumption and commerce that is China’s much larger version of Black Friday — began as a protest of sorts against Valentine’s Day, propelled by college students in the 1990s.
The event’s date, written numerically as 11/11, was associated with unattached singles, known as “bare sticks.”
This year’s shopping festival entered new territory, blazing past $1 billion within two minutes of the holiday, starting at midnight on Saturday.
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At a logistics center in Nanjing, China, an employee prepared boxes to be used for express delivery. The first purchase during Singles Day this year was delivered less than 13 minutes after midnight.
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Amazon called its “biggest day ever.” A little more than an hour into this year’s Singles Day, sales had already exceeded $10 billion.