Scott Lainer started pushing for Singles Day by selling merchandise out of the trunk of his car in Boston in 2004. (Pic Courtesy Scott Lainer)
Several times a year, there are days to celebrate the special relationships in our lives: Valentine's Day. Mother's Day. Father's Day. Grandparents' Day. So when's the time to celebrate singles?
There's National Unmarried and Single Americans Week in late September, but you've probably never heard of it. Feb. 15 is sometimes called Singles Awareness Day, but that acronym is SAD. In China, Nov. 11 is Singles Day, a treat yo' self holiday that has eclipsed Black Friday as the world's biggest online shopping day. In the United States, though, no single day has taken off with much retail or cultural heft.
In 2004, Scott Lainer was 39, single by circumstance and not by choice in Boston, and started what has become a decade-long push for an American Singles Day.
"I was the type of guy who wanted to be married and who wanted to have a family," he says.
Instead of wallowing in what he didn't have, he wanted singles to be alone together. "When you go through a breakup, you're depressed and you don't realize that other people are going through that, too," he says. "On birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, you get gifts for other people. But you never have a day where you're like: 'I'm getting a gift for myself.'"
So he picked Oct. 1 for its zero's and one's and started selling Singles Day merchandise - hats, sweatshirts, coasters, greeting cards - out of the trunk of his car. People liked the idea, he says, but it didn't gather much momentum.
Maybe unmarried Americans don't feel singled out enough to give the holiday a national push. Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and marketing at Yale University, where he directs the Center for Consumer Insights, thinks a singles day may have less appeal here because the United States is pretty individualistic already. China, however, is more collectivist, he notes, so there might be more of a need to celebrate individuality there. In the United State, "people will be less receptive to the idea of a single's day," he says, "as that desire is already fulfilled and not as latent as in Chinese culture."
Lainer, however, is still selling the idea. He estimates that he's spent about $100,000 promoting Singles Day in the past 10 years; he runs a Singles Day website, employs a social media specialist and will be hosting some Singles Day parties in Boston on Thursday night.
The demographics are now in Lainer's favor - last year, for the first time, single Americans outnumbered married ones - though Lainer is no longer single himself. He has a wife and son, and still feels devoted to single Americans. It's like being a heavy kid, he says: "Even though I'm thinner now, you still have that overweight person in you."
Maybe all Lainer needs is a big retailer or two to latch on to the idea and run with it. Marcie Merriman, a strategist at Ernst & Young, thinks there could be an appetite for a singles day - if it's done positively and not as a kind of pity party. The key, she says, is focusing on millennials and selling experiences, not things.
"It could be a complete heyday for service businesses like travel, tourism, restaurants, pampering, massage or nail salons," Merriman says. She could see people going out, getting a singles' day mani-pedi and then wanting to post about it on social media. Or a boutique hotel chain, an airline and maybe a big restaurant chain getting in on the action - brands that would represent fun, freedom and independence.
This is America, after all. To get a new holiday onto the calendar, you'd need big retailers and a catchy hashtag behind you.