Hyping Online Shopping

"Do a Google search on 'Cyber Monday,' and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday," Business Week Online reports. Cyber Monday is the creation of Shop.org, an online retailers trade association. The group's November 21 press release pitched Cyber Monday as "quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year." The reality, however, is that the Monday after Thanksgiving is only the "12th-biggest day historically," according to market researcher comScore Networks. "What's more, most e-tailers say the season's top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15," Business Week Online writes.

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