Love and money, sustenance and shopping, family and materialism: Thanksgiving is when Americans show the best and worst of their characters, and the holiday’s contradictions look particularly stark in the records kept by online social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.
If you ask the social networks, as we did, what kind of activity they see at Thanksgiving, a clear pattern soon emerges: Thanksgiving proper is a time spent with family, away from shops, researching how to improve on Aunt Martha’s turkey recipe, telling friends and coworkers what pastimes you’re indulging during the holiday, and reflecting on what one has to be thankful for. The day after Thanksgiving, meanwhile, is a caffeine-fueled capitalist bacchanal in which Americans rush past one another to snap up sale items at discount marts and department stores, then go online to talk about their spending sprees.
Instead of “binge and purge” it’s a “binge and splurge” cycle.
Historic records of online activity offer some heartening tales about Thanksgiving. At Twitter on Thanksgiving day, for example, people used the term “thankful” nearly 2.5 million times last year, up 263 percent from the year before and 1-thousand-fold from a typical day. They mentioned “family” more than on another day but Christmas, some 1.2 million times, more than four times the rate of a normal day.
At Facebook, users love to talk about their family feasts well in advance of turkey day. Their mentions of turkey are up 235 percent in the past month, while stuffing mentions are up 192 percent and mashed potatoes are up 41 percent.
Thanksgiving, of course, gives way to Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. On Foursquare, you can clearly see the switchover (right) as retail check-ins plummet then spike.
Foursquare says people like to load up on coffee before they head out shopping, with Starbucks as the top choice among Foursquare users, followed by Dunkin Donuts, Caribou Coffee, Tim Hortons, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Then they head out to some surprisingly old fashioned destinations; the top type of retailer on Black Friday on Foursquare is overwhelmingly department stores, which get 23 percent of retail check-in, followed by malls – the leading retail destination of the 1980s – with 15 percent.
On Black Friday, it seems everyone wants a bargain. Discounters like Target and Walmart beat out traditional department stores like Macy’s and JCPenney, even among Foursquare’s audience of well-heeled smartphone users (see full infographic below). Target and Walmart also lead on Facebook, with Macy’s – creator of its own Facebook app – hot on their heels. Twitter even made a special hashtag for deal hunters, #BlackFriday.
The online record of what Americans do at Thanksgiving is richer and fuller than it’s ever been. And yet for all our immersion in social networks and apps, it’s interesting and that internet technology has not managed to truly disrupt Thanksgiving. Yes, people are talking about their holidays online, but they’re still spending them offline – cooking meals, talking face to face, venturing out to physical stores, and enduring the very real frustrations of traffic and airport delays. There’s something heartening and very tweet-worthy about all that.
