Singles' Day

In 1993, a group of bachelors in the dormitories of Nanjing University settled on 11 November as their own private anti-Valentine’s. The logic was a visual pun: written 11/11, the date is four bare strokes, and in Chinese internet slang an unmarried man is a guānggùn, a “bare stick.” What began as a dorm joke to celebrate being single in a society that prized coupling up spread to other Nanjing campuses through the 1990s, then leapt from a student in-joke to the largest single shopping event on earth. Singles’ Day, observed on 11 November, is the rare modern festival whose origin can be pinned to a specific decade, a specific university and a specific pun.

A dorm-room invention

The early festival was social rather than commercial. Single students used 11 November to throw parties, treat themselves to a meal and turn their unattached status into something to enjoy rather than apologise for, a cheerful counterweight to the pressure to find a partner. The choice of date was the whole joke: a row of ones standing alone. For roughly fifteen years that is all it was, a campus tradition with no money attached, passed between universities by word of mouth.

What changed everything was the recognition, by one company, that a day already associated with treating yourself was a marketing opportunity hiding in plain sight.

How Alibaba built a shopping empire on it

In 2009, Daniel Zhang, then leading Alibaba’s Tmall platform, turned 11 November into a 24-hour online sale, reasoning that a day about single people indulging themselves could be redirected into single people buying things. That first event was small by later standards: 27 brands took part and the gross merchandise volume came to around 50 million yuan, about 7.8 million US dollars. It was enough to prove the idea.

From there the growth was close to vertical. Alibaba leaned into the date, recruited more brands, added pre-sales and midnight countdowns, and watched the numbers compound year on year. By 2021 the company’s Singles’ Day gross merchandise volume reached an all-time high of roughly 84.5 billion US dollars in a single event. By 2025, total Singles’ Day sales across platforms exceeded 150 billion US dollars, more than Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day combined. The festival had become not merely a Chinese shopping day but the largest retail event in the world, and a barometer that economists watch for signs of Chinese consumer confidence.

Spreading beyond China

Singles’ Day’s commercial success carried it well past its origins. Retailers in Southeast Asia, where Alibaba’s Lazada operates, adopted it directly, and Western retailers increasingly run “11.11” promotions of their own, positioning the date as an early curtain-raiser to the Black Friday and Christmas shopping season. What travelled was almost entirely the commerce; the original cultural meaning, the celebration of single life, largely stayed behind. Outside China most shoppers who click an 11.11 deal have no idea the day began as a bachelors’ party in Nanjing.

That split is itself revealing. A festival invented to resist consumer pressure around romance became the single greatest engine of consumer spending ever built, and then exported the spending while leaving the meaning at home.

The mechanics behind the headline numbers are worth understanding, because the day is as much a feat of logistics as of marketing. Much of the spending is locked in weeks ahead through a pre-sale system, where shoppers pay deposits to reserve discounts and settle the balance at midnight on 11 November, smoothing demand and letting retailers forecast stock. The delivery operation that follows is staggering: Chinese courier firms handle billions of parcels in the days around the festival, hiring temporary armies of workers and pressing automated sorting warehouses into round-the-clock service. The event has effectively become an annual stress test of China’s entire e-commerce and logistics infrastructure, watched closely by the rest of the world’s retailers for lessons in handling demand at scale.

The criticism it attracts

A festival this large draws scrutiny, and the concerns are concrete rather than abstract. The volume of impulse purchasing the day encourages has prompted criticism that it normalises overspending and waste, and the logistics raise real environmental questions: hundreds of millions of parcels generate vast quantities of packaging and a substantial delivery carbon footprint compressed into a few days. Chinese consumer bodies have warned about misleading discounts, where prices are quietly raised before the sale so the markdown looks larger than it is. In recent years even the headline GMV figures have come under question, with Alibaba choosing at times to stop publishing a single real-time total amid concerns about both transparency and the optics of relentless growth.

A mirror of modern China

It is hard to think of a better lens on China’s transformation over thirty years than Singles’ Day. The students who invented it in 1993 were the first generation to come of age in a rapidly opening economy, and the festival’s pivot in 2009 coincided almost exactly with the explosion of Chinese smartphone ownership and mobile payment. Within a few years, services such as Alipay and WeChat Pay had made buying on a phone effortless for hundreds of millions of people, and the festival both rode and accelerated that shift. The day’s GMV charts, climbing from millions of dollars to tens of billions in little over a decade, read almost like a graph of the country’s emerging consumer middle class. Watching how Singles’ Day performs has become a way for analysts to gauge that consumer mood, which is why a flat or undisclosed year now generates headlines about the wider Chinese economy rather than merely about retail.

How it is observed today

For most people the day is now experienced as a shopping marathon. Retailers build anticipation for weeks with previews and pre-orders, and the hours around midnight on 11 November bring an extraordinary surge of activity as discounts go live. Alibaba turned the occasion into spectacle too, staging the lavish televised Singles’ Day Gala with international celebrities, blending entertainment and commerce in a way that other retailers have since imitated. Yet the older spirit has not vanished entirely: for some in China the date is still a moment to mark single life, to gather friends and enjoy independence without apology. The modern festival runs both strands at once, the commercial and the cultural, which is part of why it endures. That double life, a date that means treating yourself and gathering with friends, places it alongside other modern observances that mix shared identity with celebration, from International Mother Language Day to the geek-culture pride of International Programmers’ Day, each a date built around a community recognising itself.

Rivals and imitators

Singles’ Day did not stay an Alibaba monopoly for long. JD.com, Alibaba’s largest domestic competitor, anchors its own rival sale around the date, and Pinduoduo, Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) and others have piled in, turning a single company’s promotion into an industry-wide season. The competition has stretched the event well beyond its original 24 hours; the “11.11” sale now typically runs for the better part of two weeks, with the date itself as the crescendo. Internationally, the day has become a template. Amazon, Lazada, Shopee and Western high-street chains run their own 11.11 events, and the date has carved out a fixed place in the global retail calendar between the autumn lull and the Christmas rush.

There is also a generational shift visible in the numbers. Live-stream selling, where hosts demonstrate products in real time to audiences of millions and viewers buy with a tap, has become central to how Singles’ Day is sold, with star streamers shifting astonishing volumes of goods in a single broadcast. It is a long way from a few bachelors throwing a dorm party, and a sign of how completely the commercial version has swallowed the original.

Fun facts

• The date was chosen because the numeral 1 resembles a bare stick, guānggùn, Chinese internet slang for a single man, so 11/11 reads as four singles standing alone.
• Singles’ Day was a purely social student tradition for about sixteen years before Alibaba made it commercial; the first sale in 2009 involved just 27 brands.
• Alibaba’s 2021 Singles’ Day moved around 84.5 billion US dollars of merchandise in 24 hours, more than the entire annual GDP of some countries.
• By 2025 Singles’ Day sales topped 150 billion US dollars, eclipsing Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day put together.
• Alibaba’s Singles’ Day Gala, a televised variety show staged to launch the sale, has featured stars including Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey and David Beckham.

A closing reflection

There is a neat reversal at the centre of Singles’ Day. It was invented by students to push back against the idea that you must couple up, must conform, must buy into the romance the rest of the calendar sells; and it became the most efficient machine ever devised for persuading people to buy. The day that once said you need no one to be happy now says you need only the right discount. Whether that is a betrayal of the original joke or simply its punchline is left, fittingly, to each shopper to decide.