Valentine’s Day has roses and a table for two. But what if there’s no one across the table?
In the early 1990s, students at China’s Nanjing University reportedly came up with an answer: November 11. Written 11/11, the date looks like four lonely ones standing side by side. A day to celebrate being single. Perhaps even enjoy it.
Then the retailers showed up.
In 2009, Alibaba turned Singles Day into an online shopping promotion. Within a decade, it had become one of the world’s largest shopping events. In 2021, Alibaba reported more than 540 billion yuan (about $84.5 billion) in gross merchandise value during its 11-day Singles Day festival.
Those sales weren’t all purchases for one. The holiday had outgrown its origins. You no longer need to be single to shop on Singles Day, any more than you need to be Irish to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
Still, Singles Day caught on for a reason.
A Holiday With No One Else to Buy For
For generations, the consumer calendar has been organized around relationships.
Valentine’s Day celebrates romance. Mother’s Day celebrates Mom. Christmas celebrates practically everyone, including relatives you haven’t seen since last Christmas.
Singles Day offered something different. No spouse required. No one else to shop for. Just you.
You could celebrate yourself.
In China, there’s a word for this attitude: yueji, loosely translated as “pleasing oneself.”
It’s an increasingly visible part of consumer culture. From beauty products and fashion to travel and personal experiences, buying something simply because it makes you feel good has become an occasion in its own right.
Treating yourself no longer requires a special occasion. Sometimes, treating yourself is the reason.
The Demographics Behind Singles Day
Singles Day began as a joke, but the joke landed in a country where relationships and households were changing.
China’s 2020 census found that 25.4% of family households consisted of one person. The average household had shrunk from 3.96 people in 1990 to just 2.62 in 2020.
Marriage is happening later, and less often. Marriage registrations fell sharply in 2024 to 6.1 million couples, the lowest since 1980. They rebounded to 6.76 million in 2025, but remained roughly half their 2013 peak.
Here’s the contradiction. China’s government is encouraging more people to marry and have children. Meanwhile, the country’s biggest shopping festival began by celebrating those who hadn’t.
Of course, demographics alone didn’t create a shopping phenomenon. Online retail, discounts, and relentless promotion helped turn a campus joke into a retail-powered ritual.
But the cultural opening was there.
As I discussed in When 1 = 2: The Surprising Economics of Households of One, a household of one is an economy of its own.
Singles Day goes one step further. The individual has become an occasion for consumption.
Your Right Hand Says “Me”
Miley Cyrus had a 2023 hit, Flowers, about buying them for herself. She was 20 years behind the jewelry industry.
For much of the 20th century, jewelry advertising relied on a familiar scene: a man handing a woman a small box. Romance supplied the moment.
In 2003, De Beers introduced its Women of the World, Raise Your Right Hand campaign, encouraging women to buy diamonds for themselves. Its message was clear and direct:
“Your left hand says ‘We.’ Your right hand says ‘Me.’”
A diamond. No proposal required.
By 2016, women were buying 31% of all women’s diamond jewelry in the United States for themselves, according to De Beers research.
The company’s research revealed another interesting twist. In the United States and Japan, women buying diamonds for themselves were more likely to be married. In China, they were more likely to be single.
Self-reward, it turns out, has no marital status. A woman might buy herself jewelry to celebrate a promotion, a new business, or surviving a particularly difficult Tuesday.
The occasion belongs to her. Singles Day didn’t invent that attitude. It gave self-reward a date on the calendar.
When Shopping Becomes a Ritual
We usually assume businesses follow demographic change. More people live alone, so companies sell smaller appliances. Women gain purchasing power, so luxury brands reconsider who walks through the door.
That’s true. But Singles Day shows the current running the other way.
Retailers took a college student joke about being without a significant other, added a checkout button, and turned it into an annual consumer ritual.
Rituals matter. They reflect and reinforce societal reality. They make a behavior visible, and even ordinary.
Valentine’s Day still has its place. But the next big occasion may not need anyone else to buy the flowers.