This Year’s Cyber Monday Was The Biggest Shopping Day Ever

ICYMI, yesterday was Cyber Monday, and boy, did we do some serious damage. Perhaps you, too, hit “check out” one too many times? We certainly did. And collectively, we did in fact break an online shopping record. Yes, that’s right. This was a historical Cyber Monday: Spending amounted to $3.45 billion online, a 12.1% increase year-over-year and the biggest online shopping day to date, Adobe Digital Insights reports. (Maybe making history can ease our bank account woes?) This year's spend was 2.6% above Adobe’s original prediction of just how vigorously people would be emptying their bank accounts in pursuit of a great deal. And in typical millennial fashion, a good portion of these purchases were made on smartphones and tablets, because people love the challenge of entering credit card numbers on tiny keyboards? Adobe reports that mobile purchases accounted for 47% of visits to retail websites and 31% of sales, also noting that sales from desktops and laptops increased in the evening hours (because you no longer have to shop discreetly once you get home from work). A few states in particular really helped break records. Apparently, Californians shopped the most yesterday, spending a cool $1.7 billion, followed by New Yorkers, clocking in at $1.1 billion. The District of Columbia takes the cake for average spend, however, at $104 per person. Other top-spending states include Texas, Florida, and Illinois. Black Friday in 2016 was noteworthy as well, with sales surpassing the $3 billion-dollar mark for the first time ($3.34 billion). But, Black Friday was still beat out by the collective Cyber Monday shopping spree. “It’s an incredible milestone, but it’s also incredible that Black Friday inched so close to Cyber Monday this year, generating only $110 million less in online sales,” Tamara Gaffney, the principal analyst for Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement. “We’ll be watching this closely next year as Black Friday could be the one to top the records.” With so many retailers killing it in (and focusing on) e-commerce, it's possible that in the coming years, the lure of Black Friday deals will no longer cut our Thanksgiving meals short. We'll likely be able to shop Black Friday sales from the comfort of our homes, which will continue to keep the two capitalist "holidays" in close competition for the largest sales day of the year. Adobe predicts our total spend for the holiday season this year to total $91.6 billion in online sales alone. So just stay calm, keep shopping, and keep shattering world records.