Customers ordered over 500 million items from independent sellers on Amazon during its Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event, which kicked off November 17 and continued through November 27th. Amazon said most indie sellers are small and medium-sized businesses.
Like eBay, Amazon boasted it sold more refurbished goods during the sale than ever – “Customers purchased more Amazon Renewed items than any previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event.” (Amazon Renewed sells pre-owned, refurbished, and open-box products.) eBay CEO Jamie Iannone had said the marketplace saw higher sales of refurbished goods and vintage fashion over the Thanksgiving weekend.
While promising low prices makes sense from a public-relations standpoint, Amazon has even more reason to hype low prices because of the FTC lawsuit hanging over its head accusing it of practices that it alleged allows Amazon to “wield monopoly power to inflate prices.”
So it’s no surprise Amazon emphasized low prices in its post-holiday shopping event announcement on Tuesday.
In fact, Amazon published another post on Thursday explaining how its buy-box practices ensure low prices, and writing, “Amazon aims to provide the best shopping experience by offering the lowest prices across Earth’s largest selection.”
Amazon also said that for the first time, Prime members purchased deals directly from Buy with Prime merchants during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event. “Merchants who participated in promotional activities experienced, in aggregate, more than a 300% increase in units purchased through Buy with Prime versus the daily average for the month of October 2023,” Amazon stated.
Bigwig politicians will use stats and numbers of year-end sales such as this to claim “the economy is stronk!”
Or maybe the economy is “strong” instead of “stronk”. The reality…as long as consumers continue to have jobs, they continue to spend money. Wall Street expected consumers to cut down on spending but they haven’t. And the labor market is now filled with higher wages too, that gives consumers more to spend.
Oooooh. We have Mr. Reality over here. “Reality” is subjective. I learned that from certain academic / political dunderheads.
Here’s reality: Consumers are spending money they don’t actually have aka “credit”. Maybe they should do the honorable thing and repay their student loans and credit card debts instead of splurging more on borrowed money?