Amazon: The Scrooge of Holiday-Sales Data
I spent five times as much on Christmas presents this year as last year.
That is, I spent $500 in one frenzied day of shopping. Last year, I spent $100 a day over 10 days of shopping.
OK, I made those figures up, but you can see the problem with such selective statistics. I can pretend my spending increased fivefold when in fact it was really cut in half. And yet that’s how Amazon slices and dices its closely watched holiday sales numbers.
Amazon says customers ordered "over 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15″ (or a "record-breaking" 73 items per second!). That raises more questions than it answers. Why focus on just one day? Do "items" include individual MP3 files? Why not just tally the total dollar value of all the goods it sold? We could be buying more items but spending so little on each that Amazon’s total sales decline.