Long gone are the days of actually celebrating Thanksgiving day by spending it with family and friends while giving thanks for the things that we already have to fill our lives and homes. Thanksgiving day unofficially marks the start of the holiday shopping season. After the Turkey is carved and our stomachs are full, we can’t resist but to power on our computers or to waddle our way to the mall to score those great Black Friday deals that we have had our eye on all week. However, if Black Friday shopping didn’t satiate our spending fever Cyber Monday is sure to satisfy that final craving.

Both Black Friday and Cyber Monday are considered the busiest sales day of the year. The general trend of previous years resulted in Black Friday usually holding the higher sales figure in total revenue generated, but surprisingly Cyber Monday arose as the greater overall contender for 2015.

While Black Friday generated more total revenue, its sales numbers actually fell 10 percent when compared to last year’s. The total revenue for 2014 was $11.6 billion, whereas this year it only generated $10.4 billion. In addition, $2.74 billion of those sales were in online transactions with $905 million in mobile sales through iOS (Apple) and Android devices (PracticalEcommerce.com).

In regards to Black Friday sales, the Associated Press reported, “Electronic commerce increased by 14.3 percent on Friday compared to last year’s figures.”

Cyber Monday, on the other hand, surpassed the forecasted $3 billion in sales that was predicated for the shopping day. The Adobe Digital Index, which determines its numbers based on collected and anonymous data from 200 million visits to 4,500 retail websites, calculated that Cyber Monday sales generated a total of $3.07 billion, with 26 percent or an estimated $799 million completed through mobile transactions. In total, Cyber Monday sales rose 16 percent when compared to last year’s numbers. Additionally, Adobe Digital Index reported that out-of-stock items broke record levels on Cyber Monday. It is determined that thirteen out of every 100 product views resulted in an out-of-stock message, which is twice the normal rate. (TechCrunch.com).

The main take away from these findings? More people are opting to shop online as opposed to traditional stores and sales via mobile devices are on the rise.

Experts believe that online sales will continue to climb this shopping season. Chris Christopher, whom is the director of consumer economics at IHS consulting, has revealed that between the months of November and December of this year there will be an estimated 11.7 percent jump in e-commerce sales, which would total to about $95 billion.

Sources:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/94777-Sales-Report-2015-Thanksgiving-Day-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/cyber-monday-beat-forecasts-with-a-record-3-07-billion-in-sales-26-from-mobile-devices/#.ahdvta:bP2p

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2015/1129/Why-did-Black-Friday-sales-suffer-this-year

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” This quote is proven to be true in the case of a Canadian couple, filmmakers Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin who spent 6 months eating nothing but discarded food out of dumpsters, a decision that they made after seeing the large amount of edible food wasted just because they were not up to the consumers’ standard of being “fresh”.

“We found 18-foot Dumpsters all the time filled with food, and the majority of that was because it was near the date label, but rarely past it,” said Baldwin, who spent 6 months hunting for discarded food inside dumpsters and behind wholesale warehouses. Food waste is a very serious issue in the United States. It is the largest single source of waste in the country, beating out other waste products such as plastic and paper in landfills. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, more than 20% of what goes into municipal landfills is food, with food waste weighing at a total of 35 million tons in 2012.

Surprisingly, most of these food waste were thrown out by farmers and warehouses. It turned out that there are specific rules and regulations that are put in place by grocery stores that the farmers have to follow. For instance, after visiting a peach farmer here in California, Rustemeyer and Baldwin found out that the farmer has to throw out between 30 to 70 percent of his peaches because they were rejected by grocery stores due to cosmetic issues such as it not being of a particular size. Supermarkets tell farmers what diameter, length and curvature that their produce has to be before actually accepting them. And what happens if the produces are not up to standard? They become food waste.

Food waste also impacts the economy significantly. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the typical American family throws out about $1,600 worth of food each year, in a country where nearly 18 million households struggle to put food on their table. The United Nations estimates that a third of all the food produced in the world is never consumed, making for a total of about 1.3 billion tons of waste a year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, in the United States alone, about 40 percent of all food, worth an estimated $165 billion, is wasted. Especially during holiday season, whereby household waste increases by more than 25% between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day every year.

In conclusion, the next time you decided to toss out that bag of mixed greens that has been sitting in your refrigerator just because it looks wilted, think about how you’re negatively contributing to our economy.

People call it the French version of 9/11. Paris, just like terror-shrouded Sinai and Beirut, occupied the latest global headlines when the capital of romance turned into a living hell last Friday. Shootings and bombings swept the city in theater, stadium, restaurant, and street corners, leaving hundreds of civilians dead and wounded. If the Charlie Hebdo shooting was infuriating and revolting, there is something more agonizing and heartbreaking about the Paris Black Friday. It brutally mirrors the perplex and twisted nature of political, economic, and religious conflicts, both local and global, in our modern world.

Other than spreading extremist fundamentalism and terrorism around the globe, the ISIS is nothing like al-Qaeda, the mastermind that left a permanent scar on the soil of America. Apparently, ISIS has a much more ambitious and clear plan – it shows strong desire for land and it desperately wants it now. With its ultimate goal of establishing a powerful caliphate, the militant group even envisioned a tempting plan to reshuffle the order of world financial and monetary system. It sounds just like other absurd conspiracy theories on the market at the first sight, but how the ISIS theoretically articulated and defended its own vision of the new financial order explicitly reveals its devouring ambition of conquest.

In a lengthy propaganda video released in early September, the ISIS fiercely condemns the global dominant position of United States dollar, accusing the U.S. Federal Reserve of enslaving the world economy and the greenbacks of being “evil and unchecked.” Instead, the ISIS proposes a bold alternative: replacing paper money with its own legal tender money called gold dinar. Full of iPhone-commercial-style shots boasting of its modern and state-of-the-art mintage, the video purports to show the superiority of gold standard and challenges the status quo of U.S. dollar as the reserve currency used by many countries. The ISIS also claims that it’s now collecting its oil revenue only in gold, even though most of oil money is still paid in the U.S. dollar.

(A screenshot of the ISIS propaganda video. Source: The Economist/YouTube)

Whether the gold currency remains legal is left to question, not to mention its practicality as commodity money. People has abandoned precious metals as money long time ago and implemented financial systems around paper money for centuries. In fact, the world hasn’t abandoned gold standard until the U.S. brought the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold to an end in 1971. In theory, pegging the dollar to gold can guarantee price stability and prevent inflation in the long run, however, the history has proven that’s not quite accurate.

While most economists nowadays agree that gold standard is a bad idea, recent political debates around the revival of gold standard merely reflects the dissatisfaction towards the Federal Reserve’s power of setting the interest rates and printing money. The gold standard can explicitly limit the size of the economy and the flexibility of government monetary policies. When the central bank needs an easy monetary policy, it will be restricted to do so because the money is linked to how much gold it has – any over issue of paper money can risk bank runs or even the collapse of the economy.

Looking back through the history, precious metal was replaced by paper money, and today paper money is gradually being replaced by checking accounts and credit cards. In his Night Journey, the Prophet Muhammad was awoken by an archangel, received revelations from the God, and envisaged a caliphate ruled by the Koran, but he has probably never imagined the evolution of monetary systems. Whether it’s the 7^th century or the 21^st century, there is no point of going back to the time when we link our economies to precious metal. If there’s any benefits in maintaining such system, it has simply become obsolete and impractical to fit in our modern world.