We've had a live sales map for every Black Friday over the last 10 years. Somewhat refined it every year with the web becoming better and better.<p>The first ones were a bunch of divs over a png of the world, then canvas with SVG arcs, now webgl. It's a ridiculously busy time at Shopify each year and an event we take very seriously to get right.
> Normal users<p>Yay it's Black Friday / Cyber Monday! lets keep shopping!<p>> HN Crowd<p>Oooh another lava lamp, look at all those live payments! That's cool!<p>> Tinfoilers<p>Is it me or is it scary that Shopify can see my live payments in real time?<p>> Me<p>Meh. It's a Friday, I'm going to party tonight.
Not the same thing of course, but this reminded me of the video of the Chinese sorting center after the 2018 11.11 (Singles' Day) sale: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjdpz05u2DY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjdpz05u2DY</a><p>Singles Day is the worlds busiest shopping day.
China seems way too quiet. There's ~8k orders per minute, and only ~200 per minute (~2.5%) come from China?<p>I feel like it is likely the "corporate" end is the HQ in America. But then we're using these lines to calculate shipping distances.<p>Or, IDK, maybe everything is already in a warehouse on the mainland.
Black Friday is useless, at least in my country. Half shops jack up priced a few weeks before and then "discounted" to original level, another half just set small sales on garbage tier devices at 5-10% level. It's like with advertisements - I suppose some of them may be genuine, but I don't bother to find out in a sea of scam and lies.
As someone who spent a bit too much time on designing and developing live Pi powered dashboards for his home office I can truly appreciate a visualization like this.
I would characterize US's 2019 black Friday as:<p>- 50% off things should not buy<p>- 10-15% off things you cannot afford.<p>Ali's 11/11 in 2019 seemed to be more affordable.