We've had a live sales map for every Black Friday over the last 10 years. Somewhat refined it every year with the web becoming better and better.
The first ones were a bunch of divs over a png of the world, then canvas with SVG arcs, now webgl. It's a ridiculously busy time at Shopify each year and an event we take very seriously to get right.
It's a tradition for me as well to stare at it and fiddle with it for a while. Coming from ecommerce, the scale staggers me! This and what Alibaba does on singles day. Kudos.
We went to my sister's house for Thanksgiving, so we spent Black Friday driving back home and then playing games together when we got home. We went out the next day and got a few things (needed and snow gear), but mostly avoided shopping.
It's way more relaxing to not bother with going shopping. There are plenty of good deals throughout the rest of the year, so why fight traffic and crowds to shop on one specific weekend?
Not the same thing of course, but this reminded me of the video of the Chinese sorting center after the 2018 11.11 (Singles' Day) sale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjdpz05u2DY
Black Friday is useless, at least in my country. Half shops jack up priced a few weeks before and then "discounted" to original level, another half just set small sales on garbage tier devices at 5-10% level. It's like with advertisements - I suppose some of them may be genuine, but I don't bother to find out in a sea of scam and lies.
As someone who spent a bit too much time on designing and developing live Pi powered dashboards for his home office I can truly appreciate a visualization like this.
The first ones were a bunch of divs over a png of the world, then canvas with SVG arcs, now webgl. It's a ridiculously busy time at Shopify each year and an event we take very seriously to get right.