China’s Black Friday Is Seven Times Bigger than America’s

It's hard to imagine the world's largest online shopping day would be mostly unknown in America. Yet bigger than "Cyber Monday," or even "Black Friday," China's Singles' Day reigns over them all, and Singles' Day 2014 looks like the biggest one yet.

It's a young holiday, thought to date back only to 1993, when Nanjing University students picked November 11—11/11 is four singles, see?—as a sort of "anti-Valentine's Day" where single people could buy things for themselves.

While, to me, that sounds like pretty much every day for a single person, it has blown up in China thanks to the backing of Alibaba. Since 2009 the ecommerce giant has used Singles' Day as an excuse for a big one-day sale in order to get people buying stuff in their online Tmall—and it's caught on.

It took just 17 minutes of Singles' Day for Alibaba to record a billion dollars in sales, according to CNBC. It took just an hour and eleven minutes to top $2 billion. According to Forbes, by just after midnight Beijing time, Alibaba was reporting that sales reached $9.3 billion, a 60 percent increase in revenue over just a year ago.

Even the consuming-est weekend in the consuming-est country in the world pales in comparison. In 2013, the gross spectacle of Thanksgiving weekend into "Cyber Monday" remained just shy of $6 billion. If someone really takes America's position as top consumer as a point of pride, he or she can take solace knowing that was 22 percent higher than the year before, and that per capita, Americans spend three times as much over the holiday weekend than do the Chinese on the single Singles' Day.

Still, if there was ever any doubt in the ability of consumer capitalism to flourish in an ostensibly Communist country, or if you've ever wondered what the Parks and Recreation joke about "Treat Yourself Day" would look like if it caught on in the most populous country in the world, or if you wondered if an online retail giant was capable of making a holiday—once the purview of religions and states—now we know.

All hail Singles' Day.