You searched online for Thanksgiving deals, snagged a Black Friday doorbuster, and blew your budget on Cyber Monday. Well, here comes another chance to part with your hard-earned dollars.
If you weren’t already aware, today is Green Monday, and no, it has nothing to do with ecology or the Emerald Isles. The name was coined by eBay to describe its best sales day in December, which is typically the second Monday of the month, and it has since become associated with online sales. Last year Green Monday racked up $1.6 billion in desktop orders alone, making it the third-biggest day for digital shopping, comScore said.
“The second Monday in December is traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year online as parents look to check off their gift lists and take advantage of this final big round of sales events,” observed Brent Shelton, spokesman for cash-back and comparison-shopping site FatWallet. “To bolster savings opportunities, retailers will offer thousands of Green Monday deals with free shipping,” he said, citing a company survey showing that free shipping is the most important factor when buying gifts for 76 percent of online shoppers.
While some retailers like Best Buy and Target were already offering free shipping throughout the season regardless of order size, Walmart is taking a different tack. The discounter, which limits free shipping to baskets of $50 or better, has brought back Black Friday pricing on a number of online specials, and is offering below-Black Friday pricing on a selection of other Green Monday deals.
It’s unclear whether others retailers also rolled out dedicated discounts for the day, as they did on Cyber Monday, or merely re-labeled their current holiday offers. Regardless, here’s a sampling of today’s supposed CE and appliance specials:
Best Buy: $200 off a 15.6-inch Asus laptop with Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB memory and a 1TB hard drive, for $850;
hhgregg: 11 percent off in-store and online purchases, albeit with a long list of exclusions including computers, tablets, gaming systems, streaming media devices and many UPP-protected products;
Rakuten: 7 percent off all tech products and 10 percent off everything else, in the form of loyalty points;
Sears: Kenmore’s 24.1-cubic-foot bottom mount French door fridge, in three finishes, for $1,100; and
Walmart: a PlayStation 4 Star Wars: Battlefront standard edition 500GB console bundle for $299, a $50 savings from Black Friday.
