Amazon's Wild 48-Hour Prime Day Bonanza Outsold Black Friday And Cyber Monday Combined
Congratulations, online shoppers, you collectively bought 100,000 lunchboxes over the past two days in the US, which might be the most surprising statistic from Amazon's braggadocios announcement today. Those massive lunchbox sales helped Prime Day become Amazon's largest shopping event ever, surpassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, the company claims.
I'm not sure which is more impressive—that lunchboxes are apparently a hot ticket item, or that Prime Day took Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind the shed and beat them both up at the same time. Probably the former, though it's close.
"We want to thank Prime members all around the world," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "Members purchased millions of Alexa-enabled devices, received tens of millions of dollars in savings by shopping from Whole Foods Market and bought more than $2 billion of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses. Huge thank you to Amazonians everywhere who made this day possible for customers."
Amazon did not clarify what the actual sales tally ended up being, in terms of dollars and cents. However, the online retailer said Prime members bought more than 175 million items throughout the 48-hour event, serving as the basis for its claim that it beat out those two other hugely popular shopping days.
It was also the biggest event to date for Amazon's own devices, including the Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote (both the regular and 4K models).
According to Amazon, Prime members saved more than $1 billion dollars throughout the event. Amazon also brought on board more new Prime members on July 15 than any previous day, and almost matched the total again on July 16, making them the two biggest days for new member signups to date.
As it pertains to items purchased in the US, in addition to all those lunchboxes, Prime members pulled the trigger on 100,000 laptops, 200,000 TVS, 300,000 headphones, 350,000 luxury beauty items, 400,000 pet products, 650,000 household cleaning supplies, and more than 1 million toys (womp, womp, Toys R Us).
The Prime Day sales event has obviously become a big deal. It's also not without controversy—Amazon workers waged a strike and urged shoppers to boycott the event due to the frenzied and stressful work conditions.
It didn't work, as the numbers tell. No doubt Prime Day will be back next year, though it will be interesting if Amazon stretches it out even longer to perhaps a 72-hour event.
