I can understand how Black Friday became so popular. Basically between stores opening at ridiculously early hours, offering all sorts of gimmicks, and news organizations covering such ridiculousness, which creates hysteria, Black Friday has become a part of American culture. Without the press, Black Friday would never exist.

So how do you get folks to shop online? How do you create Cyber Monday? Well if you are the National Retail Federation, you make press releases and hope the press catches on and helps you create a whole new term. I must admit Cyber Monday isn’t really original, but I guess that is the best they could come up with. And what does a press release stating that today is Cyber Monday get you? How about this headline I just read on CNN.com:

Grab that mouse, it’s time to shop

Online retailers are poised to log record-breaking sales today when hordes of shoppers go searching for sales on what has become known as Cyber Monday. According to the National Retail Federation, 72 million consumers plan to shop online from home or at work today.

And there you have the true definition of Free Press. When you use the press to give you free advertising. “Poised to log record-breaking sales today”? Wow! How the press can predict the future, or did they just copy that word for word from the press release. I’ll let you guess.

Just don’t tell this to companies like Pay Pal that do a lot of selling online. PayPal’s Susan Phillips said the busiest shopping day online isn’t Cyber Monday, but rather the second Monday in December.

Dissent from the ranks? They better get their act, apparently this attempt to make another national shopping day isn’t going as well as planned.

POST SCRIPT: 12/2/07

Okay so it wasn’t the blockbuster they expected, but they are certainly on their way to concocting yet another day of sales hype that has no purpose but to convince folks to buy, buy buy!!  This year $10.74 billion was spent compared to last years $9.14 billion. That’s 17% more than last year.