Four Ones on the Calendar: Working Singles' Day — Epoche A2
Report: staffing around 11 November 1. Where the date comes from The eleventh of November is written 11.11 in China: four ones standing in a row. University students in the 1990s used the shape of the number as a joke about being single, and called it Singles' Day. Later an online shopping company used the same date for a one-day sale. The joke became the largest shopping day of the year. 2. What follows from the date Because the sale is fixed to one date, the work cannot be spread out. Orders arrive in a few hours, and everything after that is a queue: Warehouses take on extra staff for the weeks around the day, and run night shifts. Couriers carry far more parcels a day than in a normal week. Sorting centres, lorries and lifts are all busy at the same time, because the peak is the same for everyone. 3. Conclusion The pressure is not caused by the goods. It is caused by the calendar: one date, chosen for the shape of its numbers, now sets the busiest week of the year for hundreds of thousands of workers. A holiday made of a joke turns out to have shifts attached to it.