As the holidays are approaching and you prepare your menu for a great Thanksgiving gathering with friends and family, Big Data will also be part of the feast. How so, you wonder? Well, to begin with, farming in the US is a gigantic, 375 billion industry heavily dependent on collecting and utilizing data across all areas of planting, harvesting and everything in between. As Big Data revolutionizes farming into a digital data-driven production, it also revolutionized your holiday meal, and likely your holiday turkey (which is one of 237.5 Millions of turkeys produced in the US, of which 31% are eaten during the holidays).
What’s on the Menu? Ask Big Data
Big Data hasn’t just revolutionized how our crops are grown, but also how we prepare them. Analysts parsed 78 million page views at Allrecipes.com to find the most popular Thanksgiving foods, and they know what you’ll likely bring to the table according to your home state!
If you are the one busy in the kitchen hosting this year’s dinner, it’s likely that you won’t have to go through the pains of those who want to attend your great gathering. 46.3 million Americans will drive 50 miles or more during this long holiday weekend, and real time traffic information (yep, Big Data again) will help to guide you and your loved ones to their destinations safely and quickly.
What’s on Sale? Ask Big Data
But Thanksgiving isn’t just about food and family, it has also become one of the year’s biggest shopping weekends.
An estimated 134 million people shopped online and in stores over Thanksgiving weekend last year, including 3.4 million new online buyers since the year previous. Also interesting is the breakdown between retail and online sales, and how online sales topped all records, for the first time breaking the $1B mark. And how are people shopping? Mobile traffic accounted for 52.1 percent of all online traffic, outpacing their PC counterparts.
If you want a glimpse of what that looks like for data, in 2014, online customers viewed over 1.5 billion pages on Walmart’s site over the Thanksgiving weekend. And why is Big Data so important? Because studies show that 30% of abandoned online carts could be saved with timely incentives – and this is where Big Data insights come in to help retailers.
140,000 Transactions Per Second.
Impressive as this shopping extravaganza is, this weekend is nowhere near to Chinas Single’s Day, taking place every year on 11.11. What started out as a bachelor’s celebration festival, Single’s Day has become one of the largest online shopping days in the world.
With 361 million online shoppers in China, compared to 198 million in the US, China’s Single’s Day is five times larger than US Cyber Monday, with sales in at the Alibaba Group this year at over US$14.3 billion. Yes, that’s in one day. In the first 90 minutes alone, Alibaba sold $5 billion worth of merchandise. At its peak, the service was processing 140,000 transactions per second.
But enough with the numbers, and back to the festive season. For those celebrating in the US, or across the world, we wish you and your loved ones a wonderful Thanksgiving wherever you are. May Big Data keep you safe while traveling, improve your recipes, and help you find this weekend’s best shopping sales. Happy Thanksgiving!
