Singles' Day

The Singles' Day (simplified Chinese: 光棍节; traditional Chinese: 光棍節) or Double 11 (simplified Chinese: 双11; traditional Chinese: 雙11), originally called Bachelors' Day, is a Chinese official holiday and shopping season that celebrates people who are not in a relationship. The date, 11 November (11/11), was chosen because the numeral 1 resembles a bare stick (Chinese: 光棍; pinyin: guānggùn), which is Chinese Internet slang for an unmarried man who does not add 'branches' to the family tree. The four '1's also abstractly refer to the demographic group of single people. Ironically, the holiday has become a popular date on which to celebrate relationships: more than 4,000 couples got married in Beijing on this date in 2011, far greater than the daily average of 700 marriages.

Originally, the date was celebrated as a cynical response to traditional couple-centric festivals by a small group of college bachelors. However, in 2009 Alibaba's CEO Daniel Zhang began to use the day as a 24-hour shopping holiday festival that offered online shopping discounts and offline entertainment. The holiday has now become the largest physical retail and online shopping day in the world, and the event has also spread to Southeast Asia. Rivals of Alibaba, such as JD.com hosts Singles' Day festival as well, which garnered US$19.1 billion, bringing the Chinese total to US$44.5 billion total sales volume in 2017. Alibaba shoppers exceeded 213.5 billion yuan (US$30.7 billion) in total spend during 2018 Singles Day. In 2019, Alibaba said that its gross merchandise volume for the whole event came in at 268.4 billion yuan (US$38.4 billion), an increase of 26% from the previous year. In 2021, Alibaba and JD reached a new combined Singles Day sales record of US$139 billion.